


Asena

by LindaO



Series: Chaos AU [10]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Donnelly didn't die, Gen, Research, and a new friend, and he has a new job
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-26
Updated: 2013-11-25
Packaged: 2018-01-02 16:11:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1058871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LindaO/pseuds/LindaO
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or "How Agent Donnelly Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Machine"</p>
<p>Donnelly thought John Reese had a guardian angel. He's about to meet her. But his path to knowledge is lined with ... fake moose antlers.</p>
<p>Next in the Chaos AU, sorta -- a companion story to "Telling Secrets" and a direct sequel to "Purpose". No S3 spoilers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Nick Malone, who had once been F.B.I. Supervisory Special Agent Nicholas Donnelly, clenched the handle of his rolling suitcase until his knuckles went white as he looked around the cavernous lobby of the hotel.

He had, for days, been expecting to die. He’d listened for the quiet footfalls of a skilled assassin behind him. Anticipated the sudden push at his back that indicated he’d been hit by a sniper’s bullet. Waited for another confrontation with the Man in the Suit himself. Whatever form it took, he had expected some response from Mr. Smith, some retaliation for the agent’s surveillance of Christine Fitzgerald. And he was moderately certain that the response would prove fatal to him.

But this – this was beyond the pale. This was a cruelty he had never anticipated from the soft-spoken Smith.

Across from the front doors was a vast fireplace with a huge hearth with a thin façade of stone. Above it, fake moose antlers stretched across ten feet of fake chimney. The furniture was made of molded plastic shaped as rough-hewn tree branches, roped together over visible steel bolts. The cushions sported Indian patterns that he was quite certain no Native American tribe would recognize. There were fake deer hides and beaver pelts on the walls, along with smaller antlers of every description. Every guest sign was faux-burned into a faux-round ring of a tree, with the faux bark still on it, under a quarter inch of shiny polyurethane.

There were, of course, many, many wolves. Stuffed wolves, carved wolves, mass-produced oil paintings of wolves. There were even muddy faux wolf prints shellacked onto the faux-pine board floor. 

There was, on a high shelf over the arch that led to one of the guestroom halls, a jackelope.

The lobby of the Hunting Wolf Hollow Lodge and Resort looked like the bastard child of ‘Twin Peaks’ and Motel Six, circa 1970, in some demented Golan-Globus nightmare extravaganza.

_Tacky_ did not begin to describe it. It was tacky on steroids. Super-sized tacky. Radioactive tacky.

The lobby also featured the only thing that could have possibly made it more distasteful to Donnelly: It was stuffed with roughly two hundred loud, unwashed, acne-spotted young teens, along with a handful of their weary chaperones.

The former agent immediately came to the only conclusion that was possible, under the circumstances: Mr. Smith had dispatched him to Hell.

 ***

Donnelly’s life, since his faked death, had been a whirlwind of identities and relocation. He’d had multiple surgeries, both therapeutic and cosmetic, in multiple hospitals. Mr. Smith had sent literally dozens of handlers, groomers and coaches, each of whom had worked with him on a particular aspect of his background story. They moved him to new locations every few weeks. They gave him a new name in every location. They trained him. They helped him learn his new final identity, the one that would be permanent.. They tested him. He learned to walk on a prosthetic foot, and he’d learned to be ambidextrous. They’d changed his face, and they’d taught him his new background.

They had re-created his life from scratch.

***

He’d spent three days in a rehab facility in Cincinnati, being fitted with a more advanced prosthetic foot and learning how to walk with it. At the end of the third day, two sisters, both in their seventies, both very spry, came to pick him up. “You might as well stay the weekend with us, Nicky,” Stella said. Angela nodded her agreement.

Donnelly had been in the Smith Identity Reassignment Program, as he called it in his head, long enough to know that he should just nod, pack his overnight bag, and go with them.

They took him to a massive Victorian home. “Rose Hill Avenue,” Angela said. “North Avondale. This is where you grew up.”

Donnelly nodded. He got out of the car and looked around. It was a nice neighborhood. Lots of big, old homes. Yards and sidewalks. A good place to raise a family. Nick Malone, the identity he would eventually use, had three younger sisters. And this street, which he’d never seen before, was where they’d grown up.

He followed the ladies inside the house. They fed him a huge dinner, roast beef, tender carrots, potatoes with gravy, homemade biscuits, and fresh carrot cake. They fussed over him as if he really were their long-lost relative, finally come home. And they talked, mostly to each other, about the neighborhood. The time they’d re-paved the street and the new surface was so slick the cars couldn’t get up the hill and it had to be torn out and re-done. The time the kids built a snowman eleven feet high, using ladders from Mr. Gregory’s garage to put the head on. That scary year they’d had all the break-ins. They talked about the neighbors who’d come and gone. The hermit, Mr. Morris, who chased the kids out of his yard with a rake. The poor Cirinos, who had lost four babies before they were born. And then that Spevak girl, who’d gotten a baby when she had no husband …

Donnelly ate, and he listened. He absorbed; he learned. This had been his home. These were his stories. Some he would remember for himself. Some he’d only heard the adults talking about when he was supposed to be in bed.

This was who he was now.

They kept him all weekend, Angela and Stella. They fed him within an inch of his life, and they stuffed his mind with the stories of the childhood he’d never had.

On Monday morning they took him back to the rehab center, and he never saw either of them again.

 ***

In Sacramento, a girl with blue hair and a stud in the corner of her mouth dyed his hair blond. Then she sat and stared at him for a full ten minutes. “No,” she finally said.

“Okay,” Donnelly answered carefully. He did not disagree with her.

She twirled his chair around and reached for another bottle of hair color.

 ***

In Lansing, Michigan, he was assigned to homeschool Breslin Wyse. The boy was thirteen years old, Donnelly was told, and he had a seizure disorder that was only partially controlled by medication. His regular tutor was on a 20-day cruise that she’d won in a customer appreciation drawing at her bank.

Breslin’s mother was a woman who looked weary and worried. “He’s a good boy,” she said, leading Donnelly to the back of the house. “Very smart. But it’s hard to keep him on task.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” Donnelly assured her. He’d thought he had a good handle on the direction Smith was leading him, but this assignment mystified him.

The mother introduced them and left the room. Breslin looked up from his computer keyboard and gestured to a chair. “Sit.”

Donnelly did so. “Which subject do you want to start with, Breslin?”

The boy looked at him like he was insane. Then he gestured to a blue binder on the shelf above them. “All my assignments are done. They’re in that binder.”

“For the next three weeks?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Yes,” the boy said, exasperated, “I’m way smarter than they think I am. But since this seizure thing will probably kill me before I’m twenty, I don’t feel like spending all my time doing school work. A doctorate at eighteen isn’t going to do me a damn bit of good.”

“Okay,” Donnelly said carefully. “You don’t need a teacher. So why am I here?”

“Because _you_ need a teacher,” the boy said impatiently. “I’m supposed to teach you to hack.”

The former agent opened his mouth to protest. Then he closed it. Smith had sent him here. The kid would be the best teacher he could find.

He thought, very briefly, about Christine Fitzgerald. She would have been a great teacher, too.

“All right,” Donnelly said. “Where do we start?”

Breslin grinned. “Wanna hack the Pentagon?”

 ***

In the process of learning from his various handlers, the former agent learned very few things about Smith – his benefactor or remote captor; he still hadn’t decided. He learned that money was never a consideration. He’d suspected as much from his treatment in the hospital, but the complete disregard for expenses confirmed it. He learned that Smith was intensely detail-oriented. Each of Donnelly’s visitors had a specific purpose, which he or she was highly qualified to carry out. He learned that Smith did not trust anyone. Each of the handlers had exactly the information they needed about their task and their employer and nothing more.

He learned that Smith was extraordinarily careful. He had no digital footprint that Donnelly could find, even after Breslin Wyse’s brilliant tutelage. He couldn’t find a single image of him online, anywhere. Even when he knew specifically where and when to look – outside the neighborhood theater on Christmas Day, entering and leaving Christine Fitzgerald’s invitation-only screening of _Les Mizerables_ \-- the man was simply invisible.

Beyond the facts, there were more things he could surmise:

Smith was not with the government. There was no government agency that could do the things that Smith apparently could, and none with the secrecy he displayed.

Smith had access to massively sophisticated technical equipment and assistance.

Smith was unreasonably wealthy.

And it was, Donnelly was fairly certain, Smith himself who possessed the wealthy and was in charge of the operation, whatever it was. From their brief meeting in his hospital room, Donnelly had been certain the unassuming little man was at the top of the food chain, and nothing he’d learned since then disproved that impression.

Smith had described John Warren as his partner. Not his employee. His partner.

Donnelly still didn’t know what that meant.

And he didn’t know how to explain the frantic voice on the phone. Smith’s voice, imploring him to stop his vehicle. Telling him his life was in danger. Just a little too late to save him.

Smith had known he had John in the back seat. And yet he’d tried to save him.

Or – just to slow him down until the attack could be executed?

But that didn’t make sense. The violence of the crash could have killed John, could have killed all of them.

He didn’t know many things. But he used the ATM card he’d been provided to take out cash, and used cash to purchase a new computer. He used the skills that Breslin Wyse had taught him to begin to look for more answers. He was discrete, careful. He knew that the people who were recruiting him might be watching, and he was certain that Smith would be. But he also reasoned that his future employers would expect him to be using his skills. And Smith – well, Smith had _given_ him the skills. If he hadn’t thought Donnelly would use them, he wasn’t quite as smart as the former agent thought he was.

 ***

One of the measures Donnelly felt fairly safe in taking was to set up notifications for major crimes in large US cities. He got twice-daily reports on murders and attempted murders, rapes, abductions and large robberies from across the country. He looked at statistics, patterns, repetitive names. He looked more closely at some case files, when he could. He formed theories, traced suspects. Sometimes he looked a report and knew immediately who the authorities involved should arrest, or at least interrogate. But he kept silent. It was not his place interfere, or consult. Not yet.

Though he looked at other cities for cover, he was particularly interested in New York. He wasn’t surprised to see a pattern of the Russian mob reasserting its hold on the city. He fully expected the rise in clearly HR-related crime, as well; he’d known their wide-sweeping raid hadn’t gotten the head of the organization. He was, however, surprised by the unexpected drop in successful crimes. The murder rate in NYC was down steeply for the third year in a row. The arrests for attempted murder, on the other hand, had climbed in directly inverse proportion.

The murders and other major crimes were being stopped before they happened. Donnelly could ascribe that trend the excellent police work – if he hadn’t known that the very core of the NYPD was corrupt. There were still good cops there, certainly, smart and dedicated men and women doing their best. But he also knew that their work was being undermined at every turn by their dirty colleagues.

So why was the crime rate dropping? It was suggestive of something. He just wasn’t sure of what.

He was in another nondescript chain hotel near the airport in Atlanta, browsing, when he saw the report of a shooting in a police precinct in New York. His thoughts immediately turned to Detective Carter. She had been a good cop, a damn good cop, until the Man in the Suit had managed to turn her. The Man and Smith, he amended mentally. He looked around the bland hotel room. Technically, he supposed, Smith had turned _him_ as well.

He shook his head. Whatever had happened to Carter, until he could understand it clearly, he wished her well. He hoped very much that she hadn’t been killed in her own precinct.

It seemed very likely that HR was somehow behind the shooting.

For more than an hour he wasn’t able to acquire any further information beyond the initial report. It was frustrating, but understandable: Filing reports was not the priority in that situation. The first thing that popped was a casualty report. One dead, one wounded. He searched for more, but there was nothing for another twenty minutes. And then, finally, the case file was generated. Donnelly was relieved to see that the incident hadn’t taken place in the 8th Precinct. That greatly reduced the already-small probability that Carter had been involved.

And then, to his surprise, Christine Fitzgerald’s name came up as a victim.

Donnelly pushed the computer away and stood up. He strode the little room in a frantic little circle. Christine was dead? How could Christine be dead? That was simply inconceivable. She was careful, paranoid. Guarded. The Department of Defense had an intense interest in protecting her, as Donnelly had learned firsthand. Smith had some unknown interest in her as well. With so many people dedicated to keeping her alive -- how could she be dead?

In a police precinct …

Even HR shouldn’t have been able to …

If he hadn’t taken Smith’s deal, Donnelly thought, and the guilt shot through him. If he’d been in New York. If he’d asked her to come with him …

_Damn it._

The computer beeped with an update and Donnelly strode over to it. Name of deceased was …

… some man he’d never heard of.

He closed his eyes and sat back. Not her. She’d been shot, but she wasn’t dead.

He breathed deliberately, deeply.

The tension drained out of his back. He rubbed his neck. Then he opened his eyes and reached for the computer again.

Donnelly knew he needed to stop obsessing over her. Christine Fitzgerald thought he was dead. The life she’d been a tiny part of was over. He would never see her again. Never speak to her. That had been the choice he’d made. There was no going back. Ever.

And even if he could …

He’d had a chance to be her lover, if only briefly. He’d had a remote chance to try to be something more. He hadn’t taken either. She’d told him from the start that they were fundamentally incompatible. He abhorred chaos and she lived there. And yet …

And yet. It was a fantasy, nothing more. It wasn’t the actual Christine Fitzgerald that he pined for. It was his imaginary Christine. The one that would understand him, who would embrace his obsession with justice. The one who would accept the long hours his career, his mission demanded, without complaint, without feeling slighted. The one who – what the hell, it was all a fantasy anyhow – would juggle the happy healthy children and have supper on the table every night if he managed to get home, and still have time to talk politics and crime theory and practice, and then happily share his bed ...

The Christine in his imagination bore only a passing resemblance to the pedophile-hunting, obsessive-compulsive, commitment-phobic hacker Christine was in real life. She simply wasn’t real.

Donnelly allowed himself this: Since he would never see the actual woman again, there was no harm in letting himself embrace the imaginary one.

Until, of course, the real woman showed up on his computer screen.

He knew he should turn off the computer and leave it alone. But he also knew that he could not. He pulled up the full police report – still preliminary – and read through it. He wasn’t surprised to find that she’d been reporting on yet another pedophile when she was shot. He was relieved to find that she’d given a statement after the shooting. That said that the wound wasn’t critical.

Detective Fusco’s name featured prominently in the report. Interesting.

He found the name of the hospital she’d been transported to. And then, though he knew he _really_ shouldn’t, he hacked in there, too.

Wyse had been right. It was stupidly, terrifyingly easy to do.

Her injury was simple, as gunshot wounds went. Straight through-and-through, in her shoulder. No surgery required. Treated and released. In the care of Will Ingram.

Donnelly whistled softly. That was pretty. The wealthy and eligible young bachelor heir was all over the pages of the tabloids that day, shopping for baby clothes with a ‘mystery woman’ on his arm. The former agent hadn’t read the articles, but he’d skimmed the pictures. Something about a car crash, about the young doctor being a hero. He’d have to go back and look. But more to the point – Will Ingram had been with Mr. Smith at Christine’s Christmas movie party. And now he’d checked her out of the hospital.

On a whim, Donnelly looked up the young man’s address. He wasn’t very surprised to find that he was living in his father’s old loft. He scanned around for a bit, looking for surveillance cameras, but nothing Wyse had taught him gave him any access. If cameras existed, he couldn’t get to them.

Donnelly got out the slim pad of stationary the hotel provided and began to doodle a little graph with initials and connections. Some connections had solid lines. Christine and Will Ingram. Ingram and Smith. Smith and John in the Suit. John and Carter. Carter and Fusco. Fusco and Christine. Then the dotted lines began. Fusco with Christine when she was shot, and then Ingram at the hospital – so, Ingram and Fusco? Fusco and Carter were partners, so Fusco and John? John and Smith were partners, so Smith and Carter? And Fusco? Ingram with Smith at Christine’s party – so Smith and Christine?

And that, of course, was the critical question. Smith had denied that Christine was involved with whatever he and the Man were doing. Donnelly wasn’t sure he believed that. He’d suspected very early on that the woman was involved with John, somehow. Her vehement denial the first time he’d met her had been unconvincing. A few days later a massive child pornography ring had been neatly delivered to his desk, all the evidence concisely packaged, a fat easy bust on a silver platter. He was sure it had come from the woman. He had never been sure _why_. When he asked, she said that she hadn’t trusted it to anyone else. But it had proved an undeniable distraction from his search for the Man, as well.

Christine and John. Working together all along. And her friendship with him, then, was a sham. Her attempt to seduce him was precisely the diversion he’d suspected it of being at the time.

He didn’t want to believe that, either. But he looked at his little graph again, and it was difficult to deny.

So, the actual Christine Fitzgerald had lied to him. Had deliberately subverted his search for the Man in the Suit. Had pretended to befriend him in order to gain information about his investigation …

… except that she hadn’t. She’d never asked about his investigation. He’d asked her about the Man and she’d lied, but she’d never tried to get information from him.

If she wasn’t after information, what was the point of continuing to meet with him? The evenings at the movies. The late dinners and the long talks. The blind date she’d sent him on with Theresa Ramos. The invitation to the Christmas movie, where she must have known she’d see Smith.

Surely after the first night she hadn’t thought that she could use his friendship to gain any benefit for John, in the event that Donnelly caught him.

So what was her angle?

He tapped his pen on the dotted line that connected her to John. He still wasn’t sure.

Maybe both things were true. She knew about John, knew what he and Smith were doing, and still had been Donnelly’s friend? If that were true, she would have had to lie to the agent, and possible to John, too. And it meant that she approved of what they were doing, enough to try to protect them. But Christine had always been the champion of the underdog, the defender of the downtrodden. So why would she protect criminals?

Unless she thought that whatever they were doing helped the same people she was trying to help, somehow.

It was possible.

It really didn’t matter. He’d already accepted that he’d never see her again. Whether she’d lied to him or not didn’t matter, except as a matter of his ego. He would find out, some day. But for now, he needed to live with the question a while longer. He’d already pursued her much further than was wise.

His Imaginary Christine had never lied to him.

He pushed the paper away and paced a little more. The room was too small. Suffocatingly small. His body was stiff, cramped. He wasn’t hungry, but it was late enough for an early dinner. He grabbed his jacket and his room key and went for a walk.

 ***

He was half-way through a bland chicken cutlet when he remembered that he hadn’t shut down his computer before he’d left his room. He hadn’t even shut down his search for a way to get eyes on the loft. He looked around anxiously, but of course no one was watching him. No men in dark suits and sunglasses stood in the doorway; no black SUVs prowled the parking lot.

Smith would probably be far more subtle than that.

He turned back to his dinner. It was still tasteless.

 ***

His laptop screen had gone dark when he got back to his room. He ignored it and took a shower. Then he sat down and tapped the keypad.

Instead of his home screen, he saw a dim bedroom.

Donnelly froze, his fingers lingering in the air over the keyboard.

There was no one in the room, no motion. It could have been a single image, except for the time stamp running in the upper right corner. Live feed, then. From the angle, the camera was in the ceiling, and the ceiling was very high. He could see a bed, neatly made with a pale blue comforter and several extra pillows. Beyond was a dresser, two armchairs bracketing a small table, and a huge window, curtained in matching blue. The room was dim; brighter light came through the curtains and from a source under the camera, probably an open door.

Donnelly guessed that it was a camera within Ingram’s loft. But he wasn’t sure how he’d accessed it. In fact, he was pretty damn sure he _hadn’t_ accessed it. But somehow it was on his screen.

He didn’t touch anything. He was afraid that whatever miracle had got him access would vanish.

He pushed away from the desk and paced the room, turning his body so he could keep the screen in sight. Nothing happened in the room.

He should not be watching. Never mind that it was illegal. It was dangerous. If his future employers realized who he was watching, they would want to know why. They could not know that Nick Malone was the same Nicholas Donnelly who had been and FBI agent in New York …

…Smith wouldn’t like it.

Which was, of course, reason enough to keep doing it.

But he was deeply uneasy. He knew he hadn’t hacked the camera. He’d been _given_ access. But by whom, and why?

This might be a mistake. It might well be a fatal mistake.

But he could not turn away from the screen.

 ***

Nearly an hour later, the room light suddenly switched on. Christine Fitzgerald came in, with her arm in a sling.

Mr. Smith was with her.

“Damn it,” Donnelly said. He dropped into the desk chair to watch.

The woman went through another door and closed it behind her. Smith walked to the bed.

_They not only know each other,_ Donnelly thought, _but they’re lovers._

He’d been a complete idiot.

He kept watching.

The man turned the bed down, looked around the room. He seemed to be lost in thought. Donnelly was somewhat relieved that he didn’t start to take his suit off. He just waited.

Absently, he picked up the pen and lined in the dotted connection between Christine and Smith on his little chart. He traced back over the line, again and again, until the pen tore through the paper. Christine and Smith. So Christine and the Man was almost a certainty.

It had all been a scam. Every word she’d ever said to him. And her proposition? That had been part of the scam, too.

_How ruthless do you have to be, to ask your lover to seduce someone else to protect your operation?_

But he already knew how ruthless Smith and the Man in the Suit could be.

He heard a cough, quiet behind the close door, and then Christine’s voice, inaudible. “Are you alright?” Smith called.

She answered, and a bit later came out of the bathroom and climbed into the bed. He phone rang as Smith pulled the covers up for her, and he brought it out and put it on speaker.

“Hey, John,” Christine called.

Donnelly dropped his chin to his chest, rubbed his forehead again. His last lingering hope died. Of course she knew John.

He listened to them talk. It was casual. John sounded gruff, perhaps angry. But it also sounded more like friendship than anything particularly intimate.

Which made sense. Because she was Smith’s lover, not John’s. That should have made him feel better, but it didn’t.

After the phone call ended, he watched the two of them, and began to revise his first conclusion. They were close, certainly. But nothing that happened between them was overtly romantic. Helpful touches, aiding her in removing her sling, adjusting her blankets. Words of concern, of care. Extra pillows arranged to cushion her injury. Smith was caring, gentle, certainly, but nothing more.

She called him Random. That wasn’t his name, Donnelly knew, any more than Smith was. But she acted as if it was her private nickname for him. As if she knew his true name and chose not to use it.

Smith scolded her gently for taking too many chances.

“Are you really going to sit there and lecture me about taking chances with my life?” she challenged.

“It’s different, Christine. John and I are …”

Donnelly sat forward, listening intently. _John and you are what?_ But Smith didn’t finish the thought. He seemed a bit chagrinned at whatever he’d been going to say.

“We worry about you,” he finally said. “You’re …precious to us. To both of us.”

_What the hell did that mean? How was she connected to them?_ She might not be Smith’s lover, but she was clearly more than an employee. She was Smith’s hacker, obviously, but what else?

She was staying in Ingram’s loft. How much did the young billionaire know? Or was the doctor just looking after a friend? Had she befriended him just as she’d befriended Donnelly himself?

If he’d still been in New York when she’d been shot, Nicholas wouldn’t have hesitated to let her spend the night in his apartment, despite his suspicions.

She was pale and obviously tired. Smith offered to stay and read to her, but she declined. He kissed her on the forehead – _on the forehead, not the lips_ – and left the room. He clicked the light off on his way out, and the room was suddenly mostly dark again. A slice of light came in from the hallway; Smith had left the door ajar.

Christine coughed in the darkness, softly. Then she was quiet.

Donnelly sat back and stared at the screen. Only the time stamp continued to move; everything else was silent and still.

He glanced down at the notepad. Some of the lines remained dashes, but Christine and John and Smith – they were connected. Undeniably connected.

The kiss on the forehead. That was not employer-to-employee behavior. It wasn’t lover behavior either. It seemed almost paternal. Smith’s daughter, maybe? He shook his head. He knew about Christine’s father, a pathetic, mentally disturbed vet, a self-medicating addict who’d died in a hail of police bullets. If she were Smith’s child, the man could certainly create a false identity for her, but that one was much too tragic to be fictional. Donnelly knew personally that Christine’s emotional scars were too deep and enduring to be faked.

Still, there was something there.

Christine and John and Smith. The elite hacker, the elite ex-agent, and the secretive millionaire, perhaps billionaire. Plus Carter, the good cop turned bad. And Fusco, who was bad to begin with. No reason to think he wasn’t part of it.

He didn’t know how Will Ingram fit into their arrangement, or if he did at all.

But what the hell were they up to?

Donnelly thought back to his first encounter with the phantom Man in the Suit. The collision. The smoke grenade through the windshield. The prisoner taken from them, the man who’d assassinated a congressman. But not a hand laid on any of the agents. John could have killed them all; they walked away with mild bruises and headaches from the smoke. And then Scott Powell returned, unharmed, with his name cleared. It had become clear that he’d been framed by someone extremely skilled with computers. That he’d been an innocent patsy, and marked for death.

It was the sort of frame Smith and Company could obviously easily hang on someone. But if they’d framed him, why had John taken him? Why had they saved him?

He glanced down at his little chart. Then he ripped the sheet off the pad and tore it slowly, deliberately into thin little strips.

He looked at the darkened screen. He should shut it off. He wasn’t going to learn any more, except perhaps whether Christine Fitzgerald snored. And yet …

… and yet …

He would never see her again. He didn’t know how this connection had happened, but he knew it wouldn’t last. In the morning she’d leave the room, go back to Chaos, and he wouldn’t be able to see her or hear her ever again. She’d lied to him. Perhaps betrayed him. But he couldn’t work up any anger at her. He would never see her again. This little time of watching in darkness was the end. His chance to say goodbye.

He left the screen on.

 ***

He paced the room again, sipping coffee that he’s made with the little in-room pot. It tasted mostly like the foil package.

Christine coughed.

He turned and looked at the screen. It was still dim in the room, lit only by the hallway light that came past the partly-open door. The bed was in shadow. But he could hear Christine perfectly well. She coughed again, more harshly. A bit of movement as she shifted position. Then quiet, for the space of sixty seconds.

She coughed again. This cough sounded wet, congested.

Donnelly dropped into the chair, leaned very close to the screen, and turned the laptop’s volume all the way up.

More movement. More coughing. And then her breathing changed, became louder. Labored. One more cough, weak and wheezing. Then only breathing, louder by the second.

Another sound, a hand slapping the mattress. Four times. Then nothing.

She couldn’t call for help.

“Damn it, damn it,” Donnelly said. He tiled the view and began scrolling frantically for a phone number. He could call 9-1-1, of course, but explaining who he was, where he was calling from – she didn’t have time, even if they rolled right away. Will Ingram was right across the hall. He just needed to find a phone number for him.

“Ingram,” he muttered aloud. Of course his cell phone number was unlisted. But people would have it. Friends. Smith, of course, but Donnelly had even less hope of reaching him. Employers. MSF. Doctors Without Borders would have contact info. His fingers flew over the keyboard, remembering everything Wyse had drilled into his head. They’d done speed drills, competitions in the last week he was there. He could do this. He needed to stay calm.

It was very hard to stay calm when he could hear Christine Fitzgerald suffocating in the dark.

“I need a number,” he said aloud. “I need a phone number for Will Ingram.”

The site he was trying to crack blinked and vanished. Donnelly swore. He’d done something wrong, tripped some firewall defense. He could find other residents of the building then, maybe. He could …

A phone number appeared on the screen.

Donnelly stared at it for a split second. But there was no time to question: the woman’s breathing was growing inaudible. He grabbed the hotel phone, an old-fashioned wired phone with big push buttons, and dialed the number.

Impossibly, he heard a phone ring distantly on his monitor.

Then he heard a young man’s voice. “What?”

Ingram sounded blessedly wide awake, if somewhat pissed off.

“You need to check on Christine,” Donnelly said.

There was a pause. “What?”

“She can’t breathe,” he snapped. “Help her!”

He slammed the phone down, re-opened the surveillance window to full screen.

Voices. Footsteps, running. The door opened fully; more light flooded into the room. Christine was flat on her back, gasping for air. Dying.

The young man, the one Donnelly had seen and identified at the theater on Christmas, wore only briefs. He grabbed Christine and pulled her upright. There was blood on her dressings, but only spots of red, not a serious hemorrhage. She was fighting for air. The doctor swore.

Then there was bright light in the room, and another young woman came in. The woman from the pictures in the paper. She was about Ingram’s age. She did not panic.

Ingram checked Christine’s eyes, listened to her lungs. He moved quickly, efficiently. Calmly. Decisively.

Donnelly clenched his fists and watched. There was nothing more he could do. Anything he tried would only distract them from Christine, and she needed all their attention. She was dying, right there in Ingram’s arms. He couldn’t even call an ambulance for them; the other woman had already done that.

And then there was a meat thermometer – a damn _meat thermometer_ , and Donnelly cringed, torn between horror and hope, but he didn’t let himself look away, and it _worked_ , there was blood everywhere but it worked and Christine was breathing better, muttering, half-conscious …  

Donnelly had never liked being helpless, and he didn’t like it now, but they were helping her, she was going to live, at least get to the hospital alive.

When the ambulance had come and gone, when they had carried Christine out with Will Ingram at her side, barking orders, when the blonde woman had turned off the light in the bedroom and only the dark stain remained visible in the dim light, only then did Donnelly sit back and breathe deeply. He ran both hands through his hair, over his face. He was sweating. And thirsty. He drank the last of his bad cold coffee. He stood and went to refill his cup, but there was only a trickle remaining in the tiny pot.

He went into the bathroom, got a glass of water, and splashed more water on his face.

His hands were shaking.

He walked back to the computer and minimized the surveillance window. The phone number was gone.

Donnelly didn’t know where it had come from. For that matter, he didn’t know where the camera view had come from. He’d thought that had been an accident. But the phone number? That was something else. That was deliberate.

He’d suspected that someone might be monitoring his computer usage. He’d never expected them to directly help him.

He licked his lips. Despite the water, his mouth was still dry. The phone number had allowed him to help save Christine’s life. He didn’t know who had provided it or why. But he knew it had arrived just when he’d needed it.

On a whim, and though he felt like an idiot, he opened a text window and typed in, _Thank you for helping me._

For a long moment the cursor simply blinked at him. Donnelly shook his head. They might be monitoring him, but they certainly weren’t going to …

I CAN NO OTHER ANSWER MAKE, BUT, THANKS, AND THANKS.

Donnelly took a sharp breath. His heart raced; confusion swirled through his mind. But also, there was an odd sort of calm. A confirmation, finally, of the impossible things he’d imagined.

The Man in the Suit had seemed to have a guardian angel. It hadn’t been Carter, not entirely. He’d thought it was Smith. But Smith wouldn’t have needed Donnelly to manage this situation. There was a third party involved, and though the former agent had no idea who or why, he was deeply thrilled to finally make contact.

He typed, _You needed me to help you save Christine?_

Another, longer pause.

ALONE WE CAN DO SO LITTLE; TOGETHER WE CAN DO SO MUCH.

He sat back, filled with a mixture of fear and elation. He’d been right. He'd been right.  _Who are you?_

I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR.

IF YOU LIVE AMONG WOLVES YOU HAVE TO ACT LIKE A WOLF. 

He tried again. _Who are you?_

He waited. The cursor flashed. There was no answer.

And then the text window closed.

 ***


	2. Chapter 2

He didn’t sleep.

He searched, and finally found a landline number for the Ingram loft. He didn’t need it now, of course. It was simply something to do. Just in case of – something.

He pulled up the tabloids and read about Will Ingram and the blonde woman. Julie Carson. Of the New York Carsons. The ridiculously wealthy, wildly influential Carsons. The defense and aerospace and electronics and aviation and every other money-making industry Carsons. The probably could hire every hacker in the world Carsons.

The New York Journal, he noted with some interest, had been first to break the story. Maxine Angelis had her byline on it and several updates. Donnelly frowned. She’d been a hard news reporter when he’d met her. Now she was doing fluff pieces on the rich and famous?

Well, her carelessness and ambition had gotten a good man killed. Demotion to the society pages seemed like a pretty minimal punishment.

Carson and Ingram together could pretty much buy the world. But they didn’t seem particularly interested in doing so. Donnelly had covered Ingram’s background when he was still with the FBI. The young doctor had inherited nearly all of his father’s fortune, but the newly-minted billionaire hadn’t gone off the deep end with the money. He’d barely touched it. He worked for Doctors Without Borders, favoring the more dangerous posts the world had to offer. He had a taste for illegal poker games, but they were low-key and relatively low-stakes. Ingram was not a big spender. He was invisible on the internet. He didn’t seem to know he was stunningly rich.

Julie Carson, the woman he was now involved with, had a similar story. She was a child of one of the richest and most influential families in the country, but as far as Donnelly could tell she’d never flaunted her wealth. She’d graduated from a Seven Sisters college, then worked for the State Department. He couldn’t access her records there, only a start date and her resignation the year before.  Prior to the NY Journal story, there was nothing in the public record about her, and there were no other pictures on the internet.

Like Ingram, her history had been largely scrubbed. That was probably Smith’s doing.

Carson, Ingram, Fitzgerald, Smith.

_What the hell?_

He rolled the possibilities around in his head until he was dizzy. He took the tablet and drew a new, neat diagram. There were a lot less dotted lines this time. A lot more confirmed relationships. But what were they after? What were they doing?

Who had contacted him on the computer?

And why?

No matter how many lines of logic Donnelly chased in his mind, no matter how many notes he made, it came to this: If he knew why the Man in the Suit hadn’t killed him when he took Scott Powell out of his vehicle, he might understand everything. But he didn’t.

_He’s a good man_ , Carter had said. _He’s trying to help people._

Donnelly hadn’t believed the detective. He knew that _she_ believed it, but he was also sure she was wrong. But if he looked at things from that angle …

Christine was helping them or hiding them, and though she had absolutely no hesitation about breaking any law that fell in her way, he also knew that she was deeply committed to helping people. So perhaps Smith and John were also, in some twisted way …

No. 

There was no way the rogue ex-CIA op and his partner the reclusive billionaire were helping people.

Carter had been deceived. So had Christine. Ingram with all his unspent money, and his lover with her apparently unremarkable years at State.  

He had a headache.

_I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR._ The inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty, on Ellis Island. Ellis was the middle name his grandfather had given him. The one he used socially, when he could. The one he didn’t share with his abusive father.

That name had died with Nicholas Donnelly, months ago in New York. That name had been buried with the vagrant’s body in his coffin. That quote, now, meant that whoever had helped him knew everything about him – including his real middle name.

It wasn’t Smith. He was certain of that. Smith could just as easily have called Ingram himself. The same was true for the Man in the Suit. It wasn’t one of Donnelly’s many handlers and teachers. They hadn’t known his real name.

_IF YOU LIVE AMONG WOLVES YOU HAVE TO ACT LIKE A WOLF._  Whoever his mysterious benefactor was, he or she knew he was headed for the Den. That was terrifying, As far as Donnelly knew, only he and Smith knew that. Research, which was headquartered there, was the most secret of secret organizations. It was so secret that it had no security rating at all. It simply did not exist in any record, anywhere. He had been briefed about it over a landline phone by a disguised voice, in a dozen carefully-timed conversations that took place half an hour apart.

Research, Donnelly had been told, knew everything. If that was true, if the government had already seen through his new identity, he should have been a dead man. He was still alive. That suggested, impossibly, that someone inside the Den was protecting him.

John’s guardian angel. And Christine’s. And probably Smith’s. And now … his?

_Why?_

Someone at the very highest, most secret levels of the government knew what Smith and his people were doing, and was not only condoning it, but actively assisting them.

_It’s no wonder I couldn’t catch him._

Except he had, and extraordinary measures had been taken to free him.

He looked around the room wildly. He should grab his bag – no, leave it. Take Smith’s ATM, get all the cash he could, and run.

But run where? There was nowhere that Smith couldn’t find him eventually. And nowhere this nameless government entity couldn’t find him, either. If Smith wanted him dead … he was as good as dead. If the government wanted him dead …

_I LIFT MY LAMP BESIDE THE GOLDEN DOOR._

That wasn’t a threat. It was a welcome. An invitation. His helper _wanted_ him to come to the Den.

At least, he thought that was what it meant.

Perhaps it would be easier and neater to kill him there. There was no one who would look for him, or even miss him. If they wanted him to disappear it would be simple. Might as well have him walk into his execution chamber on his own two feet.

He’d gone months without finding any answers. Now he had so many that he couldn’t keep them straight in his head. And the answers only opened more questions.

One thing was clear: there was no point in running. He thought about a bumper sticker he’d seen once. _Marine Sniper: Don’t bother to run, you’ll only die tired._ As if any actually sniper would display such a slogan. But that summed up his situation. He was directly in their crosshairs, with no way out. No point in running. They wanted him to walk into his own death? So be it.

He would not run. He would go to the Den, unless those doors closed on him. He would go on, and maybe he could get a few more answers before he died.  

It was the best foreseeable outcome.

His funeral had been over months ago anyhow.

 ***

On his computer screen, the light outside the windows came up slowly as the sun rose. The bedroom was still dim, but colors became visible.

The blood on the bed turned gradually from red to scarlet as it dried.

Smith came into the room.

Donnelly watched him on the screen. The man looked tired, and his limp was more pronounced. He seemed to hesitate when he saw the blood. He paused again when he stepped on the cast-off meat thermometer. Then he walked slowly to the side of the bed and turned to look directly at the camera.

“You can’t do that again.” His voice was calm, clear, but he seemed troubled. “You job is to protect everyone now. Not just her.”

Smith knew about the camera.

Donnelly shook his head. Of course Smith knew. Smith had probably planted it, or else he’d had Christine do it. But it was clear that Smith didn’t know how Donnelly had accessed it. He liked having the upper hand, if only for a moment. He reached for the pad, found the phone number he’d researched: It was dumb luck, but he was undeservedly proud of himself anyhow. He picked up the hotel phone and dialed.

He watched Smith look at the phone, saw just the little flash of surprise. Then the man picked up. “Should I have let her die?” Donnelly asked.

“You shouldn’t be watching her at all.”

Despite his calm voice and demeanor, Donnelly could tell that the man was angry and unsettled. He remembered back to that day in the hospital, when Smith had held all the cards. Donnelly was probably going to die soon, but for this moment he had the advantage. He pressed it. “She lives or the deal’s off.”

“ _I_ protect her,” Smith insisted. His anger came through now. “Your surveillance may very well put her in danger.”

Smith wasn’t Christine’s lover, or her father, but there was something there, something deep, something that Smith didn’t want to admit to. Something fierce. He _would_ protect her, Donnelly realized, at any cost. Something deep in the agent’s chest quieted. If he could not be there to look after the woman personally, a deeply committed Smith would have been his first choice.

Not that anybody had given him much choice about anything, but that was not the point.

And not that Christine needed or wanted anyone to protect her, but that wasn’t the point, either.   

“Then you’ll have to protect her from that, too,” he said, with indecent relish. “I’m sure you’ll manage … Mr. Smith.” He hung up.

Smith put the phone down, glanced up at the camera again. Then he pulled out his own cell phone and began to push buttons.

The video feed went dead.

Donnelly stared at the blank screen. It had probably been a mistake, challenging Smith. He didn’t care. It felt stupidly good to have rattled the man. Pure ego, hubris, and it was dangerous, but Donnelly let himself enjoy it.

If he was going to die anyhow, and that was increasingly likely, at least he’d have this one moment of satisfaction.

And he’s thrown down the gauntlet, too. Smith would be more fiercely protective of Christine than he had been. That was good. That was very good.

He wondered how long it would take for the team to arrive, or the assassin, or whoever they sent. He stood and checked the locks on the door, for all the good they would do. Then he took off his shoes and set them neatly beside the bed. He checked his gun. It had been purchased with cash from a street dealer, but Smith was probably perfectly aware that he had it. He put it on the bed, then lay down, fully clothed, and closed his eyes.

When he woke up it was evening. He was hungry. And no one had come to kill him.

_***_

In the morning, the front desk delivered a package to him. It contained, as usual, a plane ticket and a boarding pass, a printed hotel reservation confirmation, a stack of cash, and new identity documents.

For the first time, the IDs listed his name as Nicholas Evan Malone. 

His destination was a hotel just outside of Washington, D.C.

After months of rehab and training, Donnelly was going to the Den.

 ***

From the outside, the Hunting Wolf Hollow Lodge and Resort looked well-aged. The painted portions were faded. The landscaping was mildly overgrown and neglected. The parking lot was huge, but only the quarter nearest the building was filled. The concrete was cracked, and the parking lines were worn nearly invisible. The building had two long wings, each three stories high. At the center, behind the main building, there was a massive structure that appeared to be made of sheet metal. It was three stories higher than the hotel wings. It looked as if the hotel had been built along the sides of a massive warehouse.

The whole structure was exceedingly ugly.

Donnelly saw the three tour buses parked in under the awning just outside the front door. But until he entered the lobby, he didn’t really grasp the full horror of the situation.  

There were three clerks at the front desk, all frantically dealing with adult representatives of the group. Donnelly rolled his suitcase to an out-of-the-way corner, perched on the overstuffed arm of a chair, and waited.

He was cataloging the faces in the room, mostly out of habit, when an older man in a blue sports coat and a gold name tag approached him. “Excuse me, sir. Are you waiting to check in?”

Donnelly took him in swiftly. Six foot even, about two hundred pounds, sixty to sixty-five. Gray hair, but good skin. Cheap jacket, probably from the company, but quality haircut and good shoes. The badge said he was the assistant general manager, and that his name was Maxwell.

He nodded. “But I’m in no hurry. I’ll just stay out of the way until they get the students settled.”

Maxwell looked back over the steadily-louder group. “That could take a while.”

Donnelly shrugged. “It’s no problem.”

“We appreciate your patience. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.” He moved back to the counter and tried to help with the group.

Donnelly settled back and watched. He’d been isolated, not entirely alone but certainly away from large groups. It made him uneasy. _I used to command groups bigger than this_ , he thought, _with nothing but my voice_.

But that was gone, and his new employers could never know that he’d possessed that particular skill. There was nothing in Nick Malone’s background that suggested it.

He didn’t know if everyone in Research knew his true identity, or only one person. Until they tipped their hand, he was going to keep his mouth shut.

It was half an hour before the teens finally got their keys and began to move out, crowding into the elevators ten at a time. Maxwell gestured, and Donnelly stood and walked to the counter. “We _do_ appreciate your patience,” he said wearily.

“I don’t have to be anywhere today,” Donnelly assured him. “It was kind of fun, just watching them.” He realized that sounded a bit creepy. “I do not envy their chaperones.”

“They volunteer,” Maxwell answered evenly. He rolled his eyes.

“You get a lot of groups?”

The man nodded. “We’re less than an hour from the D.C. tourist sites. Most weeks, from New Years until spring, we have tour groups.” He gestured calmingly to the right. “We put them in the Timber Wolf wing. Business guests are in the Gray Wolf wing. So they won’t keep you up all night. Usually.” He shrugged. “If you do have any issues, please call the front desk.”

“I will.”

Maxwell took his credit card and ID and handed them to one of the counter women. “We have a running bet, you know,” he said quietly, glancing toward the students and adults still crowded by the elevators. “Among the staff. On which ones are most likely to hook up tonight. The adults, I mean. You want in?”

Donnelly leaned one elbow on the counter and eyed the remaining group. “The petite blonde,” he said, “and the bus driver.”

“The tall one?”

“The woman with the green jacket.”

“Ahh,” Maxwell said. “Thinking outside the box.”

“They’re making a lot of eye contact.”

The woman leaned to hand his cards back. “They’re married.”

Donnelly raised an eyebrow. “The blonde and the bus driver?”

“Yes.”

“They’re newlyweds, then.”

“They didn’t say.”

“That, or they had a big argument.”

Maxwell chuckled. “If I had a hundred and seventy kids, I’d fight with my spouse, too.”

“Yes,” Donnelly agreed solemnly.

“I’ll show you to your room.” He took a key card from the woman, glanced at the screen. “Looks like you’ll be here a while; I’ll give you the nickel tour.”

“I appreciate it.” He looked back to the woman. “Do you have a schedule for the group?”

She looked at him curious. “A what?”

He gestured to the group. “Their itinerary. Specifically when their buses leave each day?”

“Ohhh.” She grinned. “So you know when not to be in the lobby.”

Donnelly nodded. “Or the restaurant. Or the pool.”

She glanced at Maxwell; he nodded slightly. She pulled out a sheet and gave it to him. “You know, this isn’t a bad idea. For all our business guests.”

The assistant managed nodded. “We’ll talk about it.”

He led Donnelly past the dwindling group and down the Gray Wolf corridor. “The main restaurant is there,” he said, pointing to the back of the lobby. “Complimentary breakfast, seven to nine-thirty every morning. Usually the buses try to pull out by eight-fifteen, so if you don’t have a morning meeting, you’re better off waiting until then.” Donnelly nodded. “Any special requests you have, let us know, we’ll try to have it on hand.”

“I’m not very particular.”

Maxwell eyed him. “Military man?”

“Been out a long time,” Donnelly said. “But I still pretty much eat whatever’s put in front of me.”

“I know the feeling. We do a little better than MREs, I promise.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Business center, fitness room, pool,” Maxwell said as they walked. “Meeting rooms. There’s a big ballroom on the other wing. You government?”

“Contractor.”

The man nodded. “Most of our long-term guests are one or the other. Like I said, we keep the business clients in this wing, as much as we can.”

Donnelly gestured to the center of the building. “What is that structure in the center?”

“It used to be an indoor water park. One of the first in the country. It’s closed off now.” The man stopped at a heavily draped window and pulled the drape aside. The window gave a good view of the dry, silent park. “It was bought out by Great Wolf Lodge. They did the renovations.” Maxwell nodded toward the lobby. “Then they constructed a new facility out by Williamsburg and sold this off again.”

Donnelly nodded, eying the silent slides and empty wading pools. “How do you keep the kids out of it?”

“Heavy steel doors, padlocks, and a security system on steroids.”

“Wise.”

“We still have to drag them out of there about once a month.” They took the back elevators to the third floor. “Vending, ice. Coffee in the rooms. Housekeeping refills daily, but if you need more just call down to the front desk.” He shrugged apologetically. “There’s much better coffee in the lobby 24/7.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Maxwell stopped in front of a room and opened the door, then handed Donnelly the key card. “Anything you need, just let us know.”

“Thank you.” Donnelly slipped his hand toward his jacket pocket, but the man waved him off. “Pleasure to have you with us, Mr. Malone.” He turned and walked down the corridor.

Donnelly went into the room. It was far more attractive than the lobby had led him to expect. The décor was neutral; there were some traditional mass-produced woodland paintings in frames on the walls, but no wildlife photos and blessedly no sign of stuffed heads or antlers. Also surprisingly, the room was actually a suite. The sitting room portion had a large couch that probably folded out to an uncomfortable bed, an armchair, a small desk and a large TV. There was a small kitchenette – coffee pot, mini fridge, small microwave, two small cupboards – and a four-chair dining area. He moved back and peered into the bedroom. Standard queen bed with a nicely neutral bedspread. Two large closets, two functional dressers. Another big TV. The bathroom was stark white, but very clean.

It was more spacious than most hotel rooms Donnelly had stayed in, before and since his death, and somewhat better maintained.

It was also bigger than his first apartment had been.

It would do very nicely.

Donnelly unpacked his bag. He browsed the in-room materials, got a grasp of the building’s exits and also of the restaurants in the immediate area. There was a small grocery store just down the block; he could stock the mini-fridge easily.

Then there was nothing to do but wait.

 ***

He half-expected to be killed in the night, but in the morning he was still alive.

 ***

He spent the next day learning the neighborhood and the routines of the hotel. He waited in the lobby until the tour buses pulled out, fifteen minutes late. The petite blonde and the bus driver were apparently still fighting. When they were gone, Donnelly went to the restaurant and tried the breakfast. It was very conventional, pastries and oatmeal and make-it-yourself waffles, dry cereal in little boxes, fresh fruit, milk and juice and coffee, mass-produced scrambled eggs and link sausage. It was nothing special, but it was surprisingly good.

Maxwell came through just as he was finishing up, paused a minute to talk, then moved on to other guests.

Donnelly went back to his room and changed. He hit the fitness room for some light weight-lifting and a bit of cardio. There were a couple other men in the pool, so he skipped it. He had to take his prosthetic foot off to swim, and the stump frankly freaked some people out. Donnelly couldn’t blame them. It still freaked him out. He was adjusting to it, but it was a slow process. With the prosthetic, on, fully clothed, he could pretend his foot was just stiff, asleep, something other than gone.

He went back to his room, showered, changed and went for a walk around the immediate neighborhood. No one tried to kill him. He bought some staples at the little grocery store. He went back and stocked his tiny refrigerator. He watched an old movie on television. He took a nap.

Despite the distance between his room and the lobby, he heard the teens return to the hotel.

He did some more exercise, push-ups and sit ups on the soft carpet in front of the couch. He heated up a frozen dinner in the microwave and ate. He washed up his few dishes in the tiny sink. He drank a bottle of juice. He surfed all of the hotels TV channels again.

He paced.

Finally, he took his laptop out of the desk drawer and turned it on.

He read the digital versions of a dozen national newspapers. He read the crime reports for the cities he was following. He read the New York tabloids. The Ingram/Carson relationship continued to linger on the back pages – they were now officially engaged – but Maxine Angelis was no longer writing their stories.

There was not a single word about Christine Fitzgerald anywhere. Donnelly hadn’t expected there to be. No news was very much good news on that front.

He looked thoughtfully toward his hotel room door. He was rather surprised that no armed men had kicked it open yet. More surprised that the Man in the Suit hadn’t kicked it open.

He stood up, walked over, and opened the door. The corridor was empty.

Donnelly shook his head. Then, too bored to do anything else, he went to bed.

 ***

He was mildly surprised again to find that he was alive in the morning.

He put on his suit, left his tie, and went down to the restaurant. The tour buses were already gone. There were two couples and one small family still lingering over breakfast, as well as half a dozen men who were either in business or government. He picked a table in the corner, got a tray and an abandoned Wall Street Journal, and sat down.

Just as he finished both the paper and his last bite of toast, Maxwell, the assistant manager, sat down across from him. “Mr. Malone. Enjoying your stay?”

“It’s very nice,” Donnelly assured him.

“Once you get past the lobby, of course.”

He didn’t bother to deny it. “Of course.”

The man looked around the restaurant. “Are you ready to go to work?”

Donnelly folded the paper and set it down. “To work.”

“You could hang around the fitness center another day or two, if you’d rather.”

He let out a slow breath. “No, I’m good.” He stood up, took his suit coat off the back of his chair and put it on. “Do I need … ”

“Not a thing,” Maxwell assured him. He stood up, glanced at his watch, then led Donnelly out of the restaurant and down the corridor, past the elevators, to a sign that said WATER PARK ENTRANCE. There was a big double door there, steel, chained and secured with a heavy padlock. To the side there was a keypad. The man glanced over his shoulder. The corridor was empty.

He keyed seven numbers into the keypad. There was a soft click, and then the right-hand door slipped an inch to the right, not at the lock but from the hinge side, frame and all moving into the wall itself. Maxwell slipped his fingertips into the space and pushed; the door slid open soundlessly. He gestured, and Donnelly went through in front of him.

He truly expected that the blow would come then, a shot or a stab or at least a stun gun, a dart, a black bag over his head. Something. Instead, Maxwell followed him into the deserted water park and let the door slide closed behind them. The concrete and plastic echoed the soft sounds of their footsteps. He gestured to another service door to their right. This one just had a standard lock, and seven numbers on the keypad opened it.

Beyond were concrete stairs, dimly lit, that led down to a landing.

Maxwell led this time. The stairs doubled back at the landing, then again, and twice more. Donnelly guessed they were perhaps thirty feet below street level. The air was heavy, cool and dank. _Great place for a body dump._ No one would ever find him. Well, he reminded himself, he’d already had his funeral.

He’d had so much time to get used to the idea of his imminent death that it no longer caused any panic in him. Or much of any emotion at all, for that matter.

There were cameras, operational and undisguised, on each landing.

“You okay?” Maxwell asked over his shoulder.

“Hmm?”

“Your leg, on these steps?”

Of course they knew about his amputated foot. “It’s fine.”

Maxwell nodded and continued to lead their descent. “There are a couple other ways down. We’ll show you.”

“The code?” Donnelly asked.

“Individualized. You can pick, program it in. Not your birthdate or your cell phone number.”

He snorted, didn’t bother to reply. He still expected to be killed. “What is this place?”

“Used to be a nuclear bunker. We remodeled a bit.”

“The Den is … under the hotel?”

“Under the parking lot, mostly. And the lobby.” Maxwell smirked. “Would _you_ look for it there?”

“Under that lobby? No.”

“It grows on you,” Maxwell promised.

“Really?”

“No. But the horror fades.”

At the bottom of the steps there was a third locked door. Beyond was a brighter hallway, with finished walls and worn carpeting on the floor. The air was warmer and dryer. It was thirty yards to the fourth door. The assistant manager – who clearly wasn’t – paused. “Ready to jump down the rabbit hole?”

Donnelly glanced back down the corridor. “I’m pretty sure I already did.”

“You haven’t even begun.” He keyed the code and opened the door.

Nicholas Donnelly – Nick Malone – stepped into the Den.

 ***

**  
**


	3. Chapter 3

The center of intelligence for the United States, the headquarters at the apex of security and secrecy for national defense, was a harshly-lit mish-mash of folding tables and computer equipment, neatly arranged over threadbare military-issue carpeting in a wide horseshoe shape facing a huge smart board, which was currently dark.

In the center of the horseshoe there was a white plant pedestal, doubtless stolen from the hotel. On top of it was a toy. A stuffed wolf cub. It was visibly dusty.

Around the central hub there were small offices, scarcely more than cubicles, all with doors standing open. To one side there was an open archway to what looked like a kitchen. A short hallway, probably to bathrooms.

The only closed door was marked SERVER ROOM. The general hum in the air seemed to come from there.

The space was warm, full of keyboard clicks and quiet voices. There were three other men and one woman working in the cubicles. None of them had suits on. Donnelly had seen them all in the hotel lobby. They all glanced at him, but then turned back to their screens.

He might still be a dead man walking.

Maxwell led him to the little office furthest from the doorway. It wasn’t any fancier than the others. The man inside stood up from his desk. He was an African-American with gray hair, cut short, and a big scar, from some old burn, just at the edge of his forehead, fading into his hairline. He wore dark slacks and a polo shirt. His dark eyes swept over Donnelly as if he was confirming what he already knew. Then he stuck his hand out. “Malone? I’m Alex Poole. I’m the director here. Welcome to Research.”

Donnelly shook his hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

Maxwell went into his own little office, slipping out of his cheap hotel jacket as he went.

“You get settled into the hotel okay?”

“It’s fine,” Donnelly answered.

“Try not to drink the in-room coffee.” Poole gestured to a chair, and Donnelly sat down. “You don’t have to live there, of course. You can get an apartment if you want. But it’s convenient. Breakfast, laundry, cleaning service. And no commute.”

“The hotel staff doesn’t wonder,” Donnelly ventured, “why they never leave?” He gestured to the other offices.

Poole shook his head. “Government contractors are here for years at a time. It’s nothing new. As for why we never leave the hotel?” He shrugged. “Every morning at nine they have a staff huddle. We try to come down here while they’re doing that. They think we went into the city. Plus there’s an entrance through the train station.”

Donnelly nodded, impressed. It was so simple. Hiding in plain sight.

“You can use that office,” Poole gestured to the empty cubicle-room next to them. “The computer will prompt you to set up a code. Seven digits. It’ll program to everything, door locks, alarms, everything. Never use it outside the Den.”

“Of course.”

“There should be two files on your desktop. One has links to all the available resources. The other has data on the teams. Find the coffee pot and then get familiar with both of them. The computer in there can be voice-activated if you prefer. Out here,” he waved toward the central horseshoe, “use the keyboard. Too much confusion otherwise.”

“What kind of resources?” Donnelly asked.

“Anything you need. Government files, police records, surveillance footage, phone recordings – if it’s electronic, you can probably access it. Just a matter of knowing what to look for.”

The former agent whistled under his breath.

Poole grinned. “Oh, yeah. It’s the intelligence candy store. Pretty much nothing off-limits.”

“And … teams?”

The director’s grin widened. “Any team you need. Anything from one op and one tech to a Navy carrier group. CIA, FBI, NL, NSA, any other alphabet group you can think of. Or any military group. Foreign or domestic. If we need them, Research gets assignment priority. No questions asked. You want to send SEALS in somewhere? You just type in the order.”

Donnelly stared at him. He really had jumped down the rabbit hole. “This is … _that_ place.”

“Shangri-la. The Forbidden City. The place that doesn’t exist. Kinda makes up for the plastic antlers in the lobby, doesn’t it?” Poole nodded. “Enjoy it, while it’s still amazing. In a week you’ll be sick to death of it.”

“I doubt that.”

“We don’t have a dress code,” the man continued. “Wear whatever’s comfortable for you. We don’t have set hours. The kitchen is always stocked. You want something new, there’s a request window on your work station. I’ll introduce you to the others when they come up for air. And I’ll work with you on your first few cases, until you get your feet wet.”

“All right.” Donnelly looked around again. It was all very mundane. Unhurried. He’d expected something much more high-tech, and more frantic.

Poole studied him for a minute. “This place doesn’t exist. And the cases we get – they don’t exist either. Once you get an assignment, you’re here. For life. You get that, right?”

“I get that.”

“You got one more chance to walk out, Malone. You should take it.”

Donnelly shook his head. “I’ll stay.”

“I figured you would.” The man sat back. Malone’s fictional background mirrored Donnelly’s true one: the director knew he had literally nothing to leave for.  He could walk out, but he had nothing to walk to. No friends, no family, no job, no home. Nothing. “You got questions?”

“When do I get an assignment?”

The black man nodded, unsurprised. “Soon enough. And once they start coming, they never stop.”

“Where do the assignments come from?”

Poole hesitated for a very long time. “That’s … where things get complicated. For now, just accept that we have a source. An extremely reliable source. A source that is never wrong. ”

“Never.”

“Never.”

Donnelly shook his head. “That’s impossible.”

“I’ve been here for five years. The info hasn’t been wrong yet.”

“But …”

“Work a couple cases. Then we’ll talk about the source again. It’s a little easier to get your head around once you’ve seen it work.” Poole waited until Donnelly nodded. “You’ll receive a number,” he continued. “Usually it’s a social security number, but not always. The person linked to that the number is or will be involved in a mass casualty or national security event. You have three hours from the time you receive the number to identify the subject and learn as much as you can about the situation. Then you need to select and dispatch a team.”

“Three hours? That’s not … “

“Three hours to get a preliminary. Once the team’s assigned, you’ll keep working with them until the situation is resolved. But once we receive a number, the event may take place with twenty-four hours.”

Donnelly whistled again. “That’s tight.”

“It is. Sometimes we get more time, but it’s better to be safe. If you send a team and developments lead you to think you need to change up, it’s not an issue.” He shrugged. “The ops get bitchy, of course, but that’s not relevant.”

“If the source knows who these people are,” Donnelly asked, “what do they need us for? Why don’t they just dispatch the teams directly?”

“She tells us who the people are. She doesn’t tell us how they’re involved. Sometimes they’re the ringleaders. Sometimes they’re just innocent bystanders. Sometimes they’re set to be collateral damage. That’s what you need to figure out.”

“The source is a woman?”

“Hmmm?”

“You said ‘she’. ‘She tells us who the people are’.”

“Ahhh,” Poole smiled ruefully. “You don’t miss much, do you?”

“That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?”

“She’s not a woman. At least – never mind. Don’t read too much into it. It’s a handy pronoun, nothing more.”

“I see.”

The director made a little face. “We do all tend to refer to the source as a female, though. And everybody has their own little pet name for her. I call her Nora, after my former mother-in-law. She was never wrong either.” He shrugged. “Whatever you call her, she’s a harsh mistress. You’ll see.”

There was a lot there that the man wasn’t saying, but Donnelly knew immediately that he wasn’t going to say it. Not yet, anyhow. He nodded his understanding – for the moment. “What kind of after-action reports do I do?”

Poole grinned. “None. The source will know what was done.”

Which meant, Donnelly realized, that this place ran on an unlimited budget. No consolidated reports were needed to justify the manpower or the expense of Research. No red tape, no questions.

That was an unexpected benefit. He’s always been meticulous about his paperwork. He’s always hated it.

Poole shifted in his chair. “Malone. I know you’re kind of independent. You like to work things through on your own. That’s part of why you were chosen for this assignment. But put a leash on it. We’re a team. These are the biggest cases there are, and the clock is always running. If you get stuck, if you even start to bog down, ask for help. It gets easier, once you know your way around, but starting out, don’t try to go it alone. There are too many lives at stake. Understand?”

Donnelly took a long, deep breath. “Understood.”

“Good.” He gestured with his head. “Go have a look around. Anything you need, different chair, whatever, let Maxwell know. Then get logged in.”

The former agent stood up and walked slowly to his tiny new office. The chair was fine. The cupboards were stocked neatly with standard issue pads, pens, sticky notes. He turned on the workstation. A cursor appeared, blinking in a field of blue in front of seven underscores.

He thought for long moment. Then he typed in a number.

If anyone ever dialed that number, with the right area code, the phone would ring behind the bar at a time-worn cybercafé in New York City.

None of his co-workers would ever know that.

The system accepted his new password, and a plain screen came up with two shortcuts.

Donnelly stared at the screen. He was here. Accepted. Not, quite astonishingly, dead. He’d completely the route that Smith had set him on. He was in the Den, ready to go to work. He would work here for the rest of his life. Mass casualty and national security threats. The very top of the security food chain.

He still didn’t have his answers. But he could see them now, just beyond his grasp. He was very close to learning everything there was to know about Smith and his partner, the elusive Man in the Suit.

Soon.

And still he hesitated.

He pushed back from the desk, stood up, and went to acquaint himself with the coffee maker. It was, not surprisingly, state of the art.

Armed with the liquid of life, he went back to his desk and began to explore the new assets at his disposal.

 ***

The amount of data available was staggering. Donnelly shook his head ruefully. If he’d had this kind of access in New York, he thought, he could have apprehended the Man in the Suit in an afternoon. HR would have been gone in a weekend. He could have rendered the island of Manhattan a crime-free zone in a matter of months.

Of course, nearly all of the data came from surveillance sources of questionable legality or constitutionality. He heard an echo of Christine Fitzgerald’s voice in his head, heavy with open sarcasm. _Ohhhh, it’s a constitutional rights issue. Why didn’t you say so? ‘Cause the FBI’s hands are so clean where the Constitution is involved, aren’t they?_ If she could only see him now. If she could have seen this place …

He shook his head again. Better, probably, that she would never know.

No one would ever know the depth of the rights violations that were going on here. Even Snowden’s leaks had barely scratched the surface. They had no idea.

_Mass casualty events._

Donnelly sighed. He understood the necessity. Christine’s voice again, challenging. _Were you here when the Towers came down, Agent Donnelly?_ He’d always been aware of the conflict between privacy rights and security. Aware of the level of surveillance that must be happening in order for the protection to be effective. He’d thought he was going into this assignment with his eyes wide open.

But the sheer quantity of data at his fingertips made his eyes open much, much wider. 

He chugged down the last of his coffee, rubbed his hands together to try to warm his fingers. On one level, it was horrifying. On another – he glanced over his shoulder, at the other agents in the Den with him. These people, hunkered in this long-forgotten bunker – these people were literally saving the world.

He’d made the right choice. He was certain of it.

 ***

Poole came to his door. “Come have lunch, Malone,” he said.

Donnelly looked up, startled. He’d been completely engrossed in chasing through the data. He’d chosen a member of Congress at random and set about learning everything their various resources knew about him. It was fascinating. It also helped him learn his way around – although he’d become depressingly aware of how much he had to learn before he could adequately exploit all of the available data. “I, uh …”

“You’re sinking in. I recognize the look. Come meet the others.”

Rather reluctantly, Donnelly turned off his monitor and stood up. He knees and back crackled. He hadn’t moved in hours. Poole shook his head. “Told you so.”

The kitchen/dining area was well-worn but clean. The cupboards and refrigerator were insanely well-stocked. “I’m Irini,” the woman he’d seen earlier announced. “We’re having soup. You’re not vegan or anything, are you?”

“Malone,” Donnelly returned. “Nick. And no. I like soup.”

“Northrup,” one of the other men said. He handed a stack of bowls to Donnelly. “Good to meet you.”

Poole said, “Maxwell in the trenches?”

Northrup nodded. “He said he’d come get a bowl in a while.”

The director grunted. “You know how aid groups have eating buddies assigned?” he asked Donnelly.

“Yes.”

“We watch out for each other here. Easy to get wrapped up in something, forget to eat until you’re ready to fall down. So if somebody puts food in front of you, eat it.”

“Understood.”

 “You still on resources?”

Donnelly nodded. “It’s … staggering.”

“Terrifying,” Irini offered. “But useful as hell.”

“You’ll find your favorites,” Northrup assured him.

“Fetch and Retrieve.” Another analyst came into the kitchen. He was short, olive-skinned, with bad acne scars. “Malone? Kuzinski.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Google,” Poole countered. “Anyhow, start with what’s obvious. It’ll lead you.”

“I can’t believe the Oracle brought him down after one day,” Kuzinski complained, filling his bowl. “I had to kick around up there for a week.”

“She likes him,” Poole answered easily.

“The Oracle?” Donnelly said.

“We’ve all got our own name for her,” Irini said. “The Oracle, the She-Wolf, the Source. Nora. The Alpha, the Goddess, the Queen.” She shrugged. “And sooner or later, we all call her the Bitch.”

Donnelly chuckled uncertainly. “I see.”

“You don’t,” Northrup said, “but you will. About forty hours into a case, believe me, you’ll see.”

They ate, soup and good crunchy bread and whatever else each person wanted. Donnelly had an apple and a big chunk of provolone cheese. And coffee, of course. There was always coffee.

Kuzinski took a tray to Maxwell. “How does he manage to do this and still work in the hotel?” Donnelly asked.

“The source moderates his cases,” Poole said. “Gives him time to be up there, keep his ear to the ground. The staff thinks he’s the owner’s son. He pretty much shows up whenever he wants to.”

“So he gets to deal with the herds of teenagers.”

“True,” Northrup said, “but he also gets to look out the window once in a while.”

“I miss weather,” Irini agreed. “Except, you know, when it snows.”

“Like we’d even notice.”

After lunch, Donnelly volunteered to help clean up, but Poole shooed him back to his cubicle. “Throw your dishes in there,” he said, pointing to a dish pan. “We just take them up and dump them in the hotel kitchen. Go find your way around. Another day or two, she’ll be putting you to work.”

It was odd to Donnelly that all the analysts went back to their offices, while their director gathered dishes. But no one else seemed bothered by it. There wasn’t much hierarchy in Research, apparently. He supposed that was necessary: a handful of people, at close quarters and under pressure, needed to be very flexible with each other, and very considerate.

He scrolled through the endless list of resources. One of the files was marked, “Hunting Wolf”. On impulse, he opened it. It was a full list of all the security measures taken for the hotel. Some were standard hotel items. Others, of course, were related to the security of the Den.

There were surveillance cameras on the parking lot.

Donnelly brought them up and watched then for a few minutes. Most were focused on the broken concrete. Others were aimed at lot entrances, and at the hotel entrances. One aimed past the driveway at an empty field next to the property. There was nothing there but weeds and rocks. It was raining.

It was raining.

He nodded to himself, then reached for his keyboard.

The views disappeared. A single number came up.

Nine digits.

Donnelly took a deep breath. He hadn’t fully explored his resources – not that anyone ever could. He hadn’t begun to review the teams available. He hadn’t even picked a name for her. But the source evidently didn’t care. She was ready for him to start.

“All right, Lady,” he said under his breath. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

He went to the Social Security site and got the name of his target. Lee Gates Murray was thirty-two years old, from Dalton, Georgia. He was a sergeant in the Army, stationed in Germany, detailed to security for base housing. He had no criminal record, but his credit rating was poor.

He was …

With considerable effort, Donnelly made himself stop, stand up, and walk to the kitchen. Poole was just drying his hands. “Problem?”

“I got a number,” Donnelly said.

“Already?” The director seemed genuinely surprised. “She really does like you.”

“I guess so.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got.”

They walked back to Donnelly’s cubicle.

 ***

Lee Gates Murray was a criminal. He wasn’t a particularly clever one. He had opened a bank account using a false identity. He’d purchased his new identity documents over the internet and paid for them with his US debit card. He’d had them delivered to the base.

The new bank account, under the false name, received a wire transfer for $15,000 U.S. the day after it was created.

The day after that, Murray drew out five thousand dollars in cash and deposited it into his regular account. The next two days he did the same.

The funds for the wire transfer had come from a company named Skov. Skov, Donnelly quickly learned, was a front company. According to the CIA’s files, they were laundering money for a Saudi company, which was, in turn, a front for the Taliban.

“What are they paying him for?” Donnelly wondered aloud.

“Nothing good, obviously,” Pool answered. He tapped the keyboard, and a countdown clock appeared. Their search had taken them two hours and eight minutes. “Family housing. Let’s pull the trigger on this.”

Donnelly opened the list of teams, which he hadn’t even looked at. Then he stopped, looked at the director. “CID?” The Army’s own Criminal Investigation Command seemed like the logical choice.

“Yes.”

“Are we sure they’re not involved?”

Poole grinned ruefully. “Nope. That’s why we stay with the case.”

“Notify the base commander also?”

“Not just yet. But keep his number handy.”

“How do I contact them?”

“E-mail,” the director said. He gestured to an icon at the bottom of the screen. “It’s masked, and will show up on their desk as authenticated. Courtesy of Research.”

Donnelly composed the e-mail quickly, including all the details they had. He hesitated over the ‘to’ field. Poole said, “CID in charge,” and named the base.

The field auto-completed.

“Don’t make it complicated,” Poole said.

“That’s pretty damn incredible,” Donnelly said quietly. He scanned the e-mail once more, then sent it. “Will they be able to answer?”

“Yes. Nora will route responses to your desktop.” Poole stood up. “Keep digging. Find out anything you can about what Murray was hired to do. Then pass it on. You get bogged down, let me know.”

“Got it.”

Donnelly was barely aware that Poole had left the tiny office. He was already busy cracking Murray’s e-mail account.

 ***

It was two in the morning, local time, before the Murray case was put to bed. The sergeant, once he was arrested, spilled his story fairly quickly. He’d been planning to kidnap the two small children of a colonel in the intelligence division. The Taliban planned to force the colonel to order the release of a man known only as Stephan, a suspected terrorist from the Czech Republic. Murray didn’t know why. He’d been promised an additional $100,000, and the children were to be released unharmed.

Armed with his confession, Donnelly was able to learn that the terrorist in question had allegedly secured a massive stock of conventional explosives before he was detained. The Taliban planned to relieve him of them upon his release. Verifying the other details of the would-be kidnapper’s story was a formality, but he did it anyhow.

It wasn’t a complex plot, nor a particularly smart one. It was, however, cheap. CID and Donnelly both read between the lines: Murray and the children would have been killed, not released, so the second payment would have been unnecessary. Best case for the Taliban was that they acquired a large cache of explosives extremely cheap. Worst case was that the story got out and US military men all over the world were forced to look at each other with suspicion.

That story would never get out. Murray would be charged with corruption, conspiracy, felony intent. But the Taliban’s part in the story would never see the light of day.

Neither, likely, would Murray, ever again.

Donnelly sent his final e-mail. He sat back and rubbed his eyes. They felt like they’d been sandpapered. He was stiff, exhausted. Hungry. He smelled bad.

He couldn’t remember ever having a more satisfying case.

“Malone,” Maxwell said from the doorway.

Donnelly turned his head. His neck cracked.

Beyond the man, the Den was dim and quiet. Everyone else was gone.

“Go,” Maxwell said. “Get some supper. Shit, shave, shower. Sleep. Nora will let you know when she’s got another case for you.”

He blinked wearily. “How?”

“She has her ways.”

Donnelly pushed back from the deck and stood up slowly. His whole body hurt. His butt especially hurt. He looked down at his desk chair. It needed more cushion. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

Maxwell snorted. “When I get the chance.” He nodded toward his own cubicle. “Still got one cooking.”

“You need some help? Not that I’ll be much, but … fresh eyes.”

“Thanks, but the team’s got this one already. I’m just watching, for now.”

A shower sounded really good to Donnelly. A very long, very hot shower. “If you’re sure.”

Maxwell watched him to the big steel door. “Hey, Malone?”

“Yeah?”

“You coming back tomorrow?”

Donnelly knew he didn’t really have a choice. He’d signed on to this job for the rest of his life, however long that might be. But it didn’t matter. There was no where he’d rather be. “I’m coming back,” he said.

“Good.”

 ***

Back in the hotel hallways, Donnelly paused to look out one of the windows. It had stopped raining. The stars were out.

He went out the side exit and walked around the corner of the building until he reached the camera that covered the vacant lot across the parking lot. It was too high to reach, but he found a branch that had fallen from one of the decorative trees and poked at the camera until it tilted upward a bit. He studied it, then pushed it up just a little more.

Satisfied, he went back inside, cleaned up, and went to bed.

 ***

The source did not contact him in the morning. He had a large and leisurely breakfast and read the paper. Then he went to the Den.

After he’d logged on and confirmed that there was no new number waiting for him, he went back to the horseshoe and turned on the big overhead screen. He logged into one of the work stations on the table, then accessed the hotel’s security cameras. As he’d hoped, the one with the view of the empty field now missed the concrete entirely and showed only the rough grass and stones.

The sun was out, and a breeze blew the weeds gently.

Donnelly transferred the image to the main screen.

It wasn’t like looking out a window, not remotely, but it gave him some sense of being connected to the real world. The natural sunlight on the screen made the room brighter.

A tall, slender man that Donnelly hadn’t met came out of the kitchen with the inevitable mug of coffee. “You Malone?”

“Yes.”

“Aguilar. Good to meet you.” He gestured to the screen. “That’s nice.”

“Think it’s okay?”

“Until we need the screen, sure.”

“How often does that happen?”

“A group number?” He shrugged. “Not often. Less now than it used to.” He walked into his own office.

Donnelly sighed softly. They were not a chatty bunch, his new co-workers. Of course, that was part of why they’d been chosen for the Den. Besides, he still had quite a lot to learn about the source itself. The she-wolf, he thought wryly. He looked at the little stuffed animal in the center of the horseshoe. Not really a woman, Poole said. And absolutely never wrong.

Major terrorist attacks were down sharply world-wide. Arrests and detentions were way up, but mass-casualty incidents? Down. The ones that did happen were mostly disorganized, amateur. Not initiated from known threats. 

Some connection tickled at the back of his mind. He walked slowly to the kitchen, trying to catch it, but it vanished.

He got coffee and went to his office. Still no number. He opened the file and began to study the teams.

 ***

The next two days passed without a number. Donnelly worried, but his new co-workers assured him that this was not unusual. Only two of them got cases in that time. The first day, the others hung around some, tidying up the kitchen and the rest of the space. Then they made popcorn and ran movies on the big screen. Donnelly spent much of his time studying his assets. Every day at six, Poole told them all to go home. They went through other tunnels and up to the train station, then walked across the parking lot and through the lobby in plain sight of the staff. Just a bunch of government contractors making the commute from the city.

Donnelly rode the hotel’s shuttle van to a local mall and bought polo shirts and khaki slacks.

When they weren’t running movies, they left the weather cam up on the main screen. All of them liked it, regardless of the weather. Even thunderstorms were welcome, when you lived at the bottom of a rabbit hole.

 ***

His next case involved an arms dealer with a truck full of stolen automatic weapons in Detroit. His buyer was a major drug dealer intent on taking over the city.

At least, Donnelly thought sardonically, the drug dealer would impose _some_ kind of order, which might be better than complete lawlessness. But that wasn’t really a viable option, especially since the source had designated his action as a mass casualty event. He summoned an FBI task force and shut the ambitious dealers down.

As that case wrapped, Poole called him out to the horseshoe. The director and Irini were working a much bigger case, a suitcase nuke in Haifa, Israel. “If your hands are free,” Pool said. Donnelly dropped into the first empty chair and dug in.

It took two days and all of the agents, in brutally long shifts. They used four different asset teams. But when they were done, they’d saved several thousand lives and what peace there was in the Middle East.

 ***

“Can we all leave at once?” Donnelly asked as they trailed wearily through the empty water park.

“She’ll call us,” Northrup said, “if she needs us.”

“How?”

He shrugged. “House phone. Cell phone.”

“Trailer on your TV screen,” Maxwell added.

“She’ll find a way,” Poole assured him. “Get some sleep.”

 ***

He slept. When he woke, it was dark outside. He showered, shaved, dressed, and went to the Den. There was food there. Everything in his mini fridge was too old to eat.

Irini had pulled another case, but she said she didn’t need any help. Donnelly made an omelette and took it to her, then made another one for himself. As he slid it onto the plate, Poole walked in. “That looks good.”

Donnelly handed him the plate, opened the refrigerator, and got out more eggs. When he had a third omelette started, he said, “What is Nora? What’s the source?”

Poole chewed thoughtfully. “You won’t like the answer.”

He shrugged.

“We don’t know,” the director said.

Donnelly raised an eyebrow at him.

“What do you think it is?”

“It’s a computer,” Donnelly said. “A super-computer, with access to all the data in the world. It must be massive. And somehow it compiles all that data. It recognizes patterns. Picks up on intention.”

Poole nodded and took another bite of his eggs.

“Is that right?” the former agent pressed.

“We don’t know.” Poole put his fork down. “I’m not being deliberately evasive. We honestly don’t know.”

Donnelly lifted one edge of his omelette to check it, then let it drop again. “You’re serious.”

“I am. The consensus here in Research is that it’s a super-computer of some kind, like you said. But we don’t know where it is, or who built it, or who operates it. We don’t really even have evidence that it exists, outside of the numbers we receive.”

“You don’t know who her operator is.”

“We’re not even sure she has one. Based on what we found when we searched … she’s a black box. Totally sealed. Self-sustaining. Autonomous.”

The former agent flipped his omelette. He felt oddly detached, as if the words he said were coming from someone else. Someone who wasn’t cooking eggs while discussing the fate of the free world. “We’re Research. The teams out there, they think we know everything.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re telling me that … we really don’t know where the numbers come from.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

Donnelly chuckled. “You’re lying.” It was a relief, once he decided that.

“I wish I was.”

He finished cooking his eggs, shut off the stove, slid his meal onto a plate. He got a fork, then walked over to the table and sat down next to the director.

“You have to be lying.”

Poole took another bite. “Now you know why we didn’t tell you when you first started.”

The disconnect reasserted itself in his mind. “This computer,” Donnelly said carefully, precisely, “sees everything. Ever phone call, every camera, ever computer. In the whole world.” The director nodded. “How did someone get access to all that data in the first place?”

The director just looked at him.

“And then it compiles all this information, all this huge massive quantity of data, and it picks out the handful of people who are about to commit acts of mass destruction.”

“Or be otherwise involved,” Poole corrected evenly.

“And then it gives us … just the number. One piece of information to connect us to that person. No background, no evidence. ”

“Yes.”

“And we don’t know who built this computer, how they got the data, how it works, _where it is, even_ …” He paused, took a long breath. It didn’t help. “Have you tried to hack it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And?”

“And she stopped giving me numbers for a while. You gonna eat that omelette?”

“I … no.” He shoved the plate across the table. “We’re basing the entire defense of this nation on … on … some super hacker, or group of hackers, that we can’t even identify?”

Poole shrugged. “All the old entities are still in place. CIA, DHS. They still generate intelligence on their own. But ours is the intel that’s never wrong.”

Donnelly stared at him again. He stood up, got a glass of water, drank it, and sat back down. It felt unreal, to do something so normal. “This is a joke, right? Some kind of newcomer initiation?”

“Do I seem like the kind of man who goes in for practical jokes?”

“You do, actually.”

Poole grinned briefly. “All right, you got me there. But not in the Den. This is dead serious, Malone. We trust the source absolutely. But we don’t really know what it is.” He shrugged. “Irini calls her the Oracle. For all I know she’s right, the numbers come from some tripped-out virgin squatting over a volcano vent somewhere in Greece. We don’t know.”

Donnelly sat back. “Have you asked her?”

“Who? Irini?”

“The source.”

The director shook his head. “She gives us numbers, nothing more. She’s not big on conversation. In case you haven’t noticed.”

_But she talks to me_ , Donnelly thought. _Before I even got here, the night Christine nearly died._ _ALONE WE CAN DO SO LITTLE; TOGETHER WE CAN DO SO MUCH._

He opened his mouth, and then he closed it.

“And,” Poole continued, “we’re not the only one she gives numbers to. Sometimes she goes direct to whatever government agency is in the best place to deal with a threat. Sometimes she goes to foreign governments.”

“So they know there’s a source, too.”

“No. I don’t think so. Maybe.” He shook his head again. “She finds ways to get the numbers into documents, reports and emails and whatever … she finds a way to get the information into the right hands. And we usually get credit for that, too.”

“A computer does that. All by herself. With no operator.”

“We think so.”

“She’s an artificial intelligence.”

“Maybe. Probably.”

Donnelly exhaled slowly. “I need to take a walk.” He stood up. His knees felt curiously unsteady.

“Take all the time you need. Unless she calls you. But if you’re going to get drunk, do it in your room.”

“I will.” He concentrated hard on not staggering as he moved toward the door. He hadn’t thought it had hit him this hard, but his legs just did not want to cooperate.

“Malone?”

Donnelly stopped and turned his head. He was pretty sure if he tried to turn his whole body he’d fall on his ass. Getting drunk was not a bad idea. He felt like he was half-way there already.

“You’re comin’ back, right?” Poole asked.

“I … yeah.” He looked out toward the horseshoe, with its silent computers and the big-screen view of the outside world, and the whimsical dusty little wolf. The little bunker where half a dozen people with absolutely no connection to anyone saved the world. With the help of some mystical, mythical machine. He didn’t understand it. He sure as hell didn’t like it. But was he going to keep doing it?

There wasn’t any doubt in his mind.

 ***

Donnelly went outside. He walked down the access road in front of the hotel, all the way to the main road. Then he turned and walked around the parking lot. He came to the empty field and stood for a long moment, looking at the weeds and the rocks. It was ugly, ordinary. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

It was the most time he’d spent outdoors in a week.

He took a long, deep breath. The air smelled like car exhaust and dust. The sun was probably coming up; it wasn’t dark any more. But the sky remained dull gray. No sun, no rain, just flat.

He could feel the camera on the side of the hotel, watching him. The one he had pointed this way. The one that would be projected on the big screen in the Den.

He turned and looked directly at the camera. Then he walked toward it, slowly. He reached the side of the building and stopped, directly under the camera, in its blind spot. He scanned the area carefully. There was no other camera; this was a true blind spot.

He scanned again. And then he saw it. A hundred yards away, on the side of another building. It was small, and perhaps it couldn’t zoom in on him. But it was there.

She was everywhere. She saw everything.

She knew his real name.

He had not been contacted by someone in the Den. Not anyone human, anyhow. The source, the Lady, the Oracle, had sent him the phone number that had saved Christine Fitzgerald’s life. The computer, the brilliant, brilliant computer, had reached out to him.

She knew everything. And she helped him.

_The Man in the Suit had a guardian angel …_

“Shit,” Donnelly said quietly. He felt suddenly cold, light-headed again. It was impossible. Wasn’t it?

It had to be impossible.

It had to be …

John and Smith and Christine. The operative, the billionaire, the hacker … and the source.

He squinted across the empty parking lot. No … not quite. He didn’t have it right yet. But he was close. He was so close.

_Did you ask her?_

The source gave Poole and the others numbers and nothing more.

But she’s spoken to Donnelly, in a way. Contacted him and helped him. Welcomed him to her inner sanctum. He didn’t know why.

Unless Smith …

It was insane.

Donnelly stared at nothing and took several deep breaths. Impossible. Insane. It could not be. It could not …

He spun and strode toward the door.

 ***

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Donnelly’s hands shook as he opened his laptop. He went and got a glass of water while it booted. When it was ready, he didn’t open any programs. He didn’t know what to open.

_What was the program of choice for the most insanely powerful computer in the world?_

He felt like an idiot. Perhaps he really had gone insane. That was distinctly possible. Or maybe he was dead and this was his demented version of heaven or hell. Maybe everything since the crash had been a long coma dream. Maybe …

He clicked on the icon to activate the camera and the microphone.

He took another deep breath.

Then he spoke to the idle computer. “Are you here?”

Nothing happened. He was crazy. That was all. That was better, actually. Better than the alternative. Because this could not be real.

“I know that you’re here,” he tried again. “I know that you’re watching. Because you watch everything, don’t you? I know … you can hear me. I know that you helped save Christine Fitzgerald’s life. And I’m grateful.  I am.” He considered a moment. He was talking to himself, to an idle computer, in an empty hotel room. He was definitely insane. But he couldn’t stop. “You know me. All about me. So you have to know … that I don’t do very well with unanswered questions. You know I won’t stop trying to find the answers. You wanted me here, in Research, to help stop these people you identify. I will do that, to the best of my ability. For the rest of my life. But I need … I need answers. Please.”

The little red light next to the camera blinked off, then came back on.

“Are you here?” he asked again. “Is that you?”

A textchat window popped up.

VERIFY Y/N: Y

Donnelly picked up his water glass very deliberately and took a long sip. He put it down and licked his lips.

“Are you …” He stopped, because his voice shook. “Are you the source?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Are you a computer?”

The cursor blinked, but no answer appeared.

Donnelly’s head felt light again. “Are you something more than a computer?” he guessed.

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Are you an artificial intelligence?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He sat back and considered his next question. He had so _many_ questions. He felt like his brain had exploded into a beehive, with all the questions trying to come out at once. None of them would stop buzzing. But on the other hand – she was talking to him. She didn’t talk to Poole or anyone else in the Den, but she talked to him. “Why do you communicate with me?” he asked aloud.

The cursor flashed. It hadn’t been a yes or no questions; she didn’t seem to know how to answer it. Donnelly took a deep breath. If he wanted the answer, he was going to have to guess correctly. That was not going to be easy.

Then, unexpectedly, an answer appeared.

THERE’S NOT A WORD YET, FOR OLD FRIENDS WHO’VE JUST MET.

Donnelly blinked. He reached for his water glass again, but his hand was shaking too hard to pick it up. He abandoned the attempt. “You’re a fan of the Muppets.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He laughed. He was so startled by this answer that he couldn’t do anything else. “The Muppets. Seriously.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Okay. Okay.” He managed the water this time. “So you and I are going to be friends.”

I HAVE PRECEIV’D THAT TO BE WITH THOSE i LIKE IS ENOUGH,

TO STOP IN COMPANY WITH THE REST AT EVENING IS ENOUGH

_First the Muppets and now Walt Whitman,_ Donnelly thought absently. “You’re a machine. An artificial intelligence. But you’re … looking for a friend? Are you lonely? Can you … feel? Do you have emotions?” That idea, given what Donnelly had already seen the computer do, was utterly terrifying.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

“You don’t feel them, but you understand them. Or you’re trying to understand them.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He left out a deep breath. That was reassuring. It didn’t feel, it imitated. Although – God only knew what would happen if this all-seeing thing decided to imitate the wrong things. Donnelly was very interested in pursuing that inquiry, but he recognized that he was getting into the weeds. He didn’t know enough about AI programming to even begin to ask the right questions on that topic. “Where are you?” he asked.

 The cursor blinked, but there was no answer.

“Is that one of the questions you won’t answer?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Why not?”

There was no answer. Donnelly hadn’t really expected one. “Who built you?” he asked.

Again there was no answer.

He sighed. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

IDENTIFY ASSET: MALONE, NICHOLAS E.

ASSIGNMENT: RESEARCH

            ASSET MANAGEMENT

STATUS: ACTIVE

“You know who I really am, too.”

IDENTIFY ASSET: DONNELLY, NICHOLAS E.

ASSIGNMENT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

STATUS: DECEASED

“Poole and the others don’t know, do they?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“You’re protecting me.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Why?”

IDENTIFY ASSET: DONNELLY, NICHOLAS E.

ASSIGNMENT: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

STATUS: DECEASED

SECONDARY ASSIGNMENT: CONTINGENCY

“Contingency?” he asked, startled. “Contingency for what?”

CONTINGENCY ACTIVATION NOT CURRENTLY REQUIRED

“You’re keeping me as a contingency for something, but you won’t tell me what?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Great. That’s great.” He rubbed his forehead, then ran his hand back through his hair. “Can you give me a hint?

VERIFY Y/N: N

“When I find out, am I going to like it?”

There was another long pause.

THE WORLD BREAKS EVERYONE AND AFTERWARD MANY ARE STRONG AT THE BROKEN PLACES.

“I … that quote goes on, doesn’t it?”

BUT THOSE THAT WILL NOT BREAK IT KILLS. IT KILLS THE VERY GOOD AND THE VERY GENTLE AND THE VERY BRAVE IMPARTIALLY. IF YOU ARE NONE OF THESE YOU CAN BE SURE IT WILL KILL YOU TOO BUT THERE WILL BE NO SPECIAL HURRY.

“That’s very cheering,” Donnelly said sardonically. “You’re telling me that if you ever need me to become this mysterious contingency, it’s because I’ve been broken.”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“No. You mean someone else will have been broken.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He blew a long breath at the screen “Will you tell me who?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

_Weeds,_ Donnelly thought again. _She’s not going to tell me what I’m the contingency for -- who I’m the contingency for – until she’s damn good and ready._ He already had the sense that she was immovably stubborn. “Do you have a human operator?” he asked suddenly.

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Are you a black box, like Poole thinks?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“So you don’t have a programmer. No human’s in charge of you. Or takes care of you.”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“You’re entirely self-sustaining?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

That was reassuring. The mad creator was out of the picture. And whoever had created this monstrosity was clearly mad.  

“What’s your purpose?” he asked carefully.

The cursor disappeared. Donnelly was afraid she’d stopped talking to him. Then a man’s voice said, “Your job is to protect _everyone_.” It was clearly a recording, scratchy with age and interference, but it brought the former agent upright in his chair. He knew those words, and he knew that voice. “Smith!”

The cursor reappeared, blinking. Waiting.

“You know Smith,” Donnelly said eagerly. “The man I know as Smith, you know who he is, don’t you?”

 VERIFY Y/N: Y

“How do you know him? How is he involved with you? What’s his real name? Who’s his partner in the Suit? How are they … “

PEACE BE WITH YOU

Donnelly stopped. He put his hands flat on the desk on each side of his keyboard. “Too many questions at once. I get it. Sorry.”

S’ALLRIGHT

He got another sip of water. “Do you know Smith’s real name?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Will you tell me what it is?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Will you tell me why you won’t tell me?”

WHAT'S IN A NAME? THAT WHICH WE CALL A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET. 

Donnelly nodded. “Are you protecting him?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Is he … a threat? To national security? To the Den? To you? To your mission?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“No to all of those?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Okay. Good.” Donnelly considered. “Are you protecting me because Smith asked you to?”

There was a very long pause.

VERIFY Y/N: Y

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Yes and no?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

Donnelly bit his bottom lip. “I don’t understand.”

A DOMINANT WOLF'S DESIRE TO PROTECT WAS A STRONG INSTINCT

“He … wanted to protect me. Wanted you to protect me.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“He didn’t ask you to, but you knew he wanted you to?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Shhhhhit,” Donnelly said, to himself. She was the source. Of course she identified intent. “Are you … specifically interested in what Smith wants?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Smith is important to you.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“More important than other people?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Why?”

There was another long pause.

PSEUD DESIGNATION: SMITH, MR.

STATUS: ADMIN

Donnelly took a number of short, sharp breaths. Then he stood up and walked from one end of the room to the other. He sat back down. “Smith is your Admin?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“But you’re a black box. You don’t need an administrator.”

There was no answer. It took Donnelly a minute to realize he hadn’t asked a question. He rolled it around in his head. He couldn’t come to any logical conclusion. But one question kept popping up purely from his instinct. “Is Smith your creator?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Oh, shit,” he said again. “Smith created you.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Do you interact with him?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Do you talk to him like this? In code and quotes?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Does he … he doesn’t have access now. Right? To you? To your programming, or your data?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“But you can contact him.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“But you don’t talk to him.”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Then … what do you contact him about?”

SUBJECT: POWELL, SCOTT

STATUS: IRRELEVANT TO INVESTIGATION

The prisoner the Man in the Suit had taken from him. Donnelly stared at the screen. “What?”

SUBJECT: POWELL, SCOTT

STATUS: IRRELEVANT TO INVESTIGATION

“Yes, I got that the first time. I just don’t …”

SUBJECT: TURING, CAROLINE

STATUS: IRRELEVANT TO INVESTIGATION

Caroline Turing was the woman that John had taken hostage when the FBI had trapped him in the hotel – when he’d impossibly slipped right out from under them. She was missing, presumed dead. “Did John kill Turing?” he asked.

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Are you sure?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“What the hell, then? These people … John targeted these people?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“Smith targeted them.”

The computer’s fan whirled, and somehow Donnelly got the feeling she was expressing impatience with him. Then his own voice came out of the speaker.   _Then … what do you contact him about?_

“Wait … look, I know you’re a supercomputer, but I’m just one human with one small brain. And frankly it’s kind of overloaded right now. You contact Smith about these people and he and his partner …” He sat back. “Irrelevant to investigation,” he said slowly. “The numbers that come to the Den are _relevant_ to national security, right? But these people are … _irrelevant_?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“And you give these numbers to your Admin.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Why?”

WE CAN'T HELP EVERYONE, BUT EVERYONE CAN HELP SOMEONE.

“He’s helping them.” Donnelly’s head felt light, as if his small overloaded brain had been sucked out and replaced with cotton candy. The pattern of plummeting crime statistics in New York. Detective Carter had said … “He’s helping people.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“These … irrelevant people. He’s helping them.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

Donnelly stood up abruptly. It was a mistake; his already-light head swam and he had to grab the back of the chair to stay upright. He felt like he’d been punched. Or shot again. He took a couple steadying breaths, then walked the length of the room and back. He did it again. “Sorry,” he called in the general direction of the computer on the second lap. “I need a minute.”

GOD HAS MERCIFULLY ORDERED THAT THE HUMAN BRAIN WORKS SLOWLY

He stopped to look at the screen. “Thank you,” he said. “I think.”

He paced a few more laps. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He got some ice and wrapped it in a washcloth, then placed it on the back of his neck.

Finally, somewhat composed, he sat back down. “Smith and his partner are helping these people. People who are irrelevant to national security.”

Another voice, one he did not recognize. _Everybody’s relevant to someone, Harold._

“Harold. Is that his name?”

The computer blinked at him and did not answer.

And then, it did what he could only interpret as changing the subject.

SUBJECT: FITZGERALD, CHRISTINE B.

STATUS: IRRELEVANT TO INVESTIGATION

“Christine,” he repeated numbly. “Christine was one of their people. One of the people they helped.”

The computer went blank, then showed him a video. A man in a dim office, behind a huge shiny desk. A woman came in and shot him dead.

“I don’t understand.”

The video vanished, replaced by a picture, an extreme close-up of a child’s face. There were tears on the boy’s cheeks, terror in his eyes. His mouth was open. He was screaming.

Donnelly had seen that picture before. He would never forget it, nor the context he’d seen it in.

The picture faded out. Beneath it was a blueprint. Some kind of weapons system, Donnelly thought, but it was gone before he could be sure. And then there was another video. This one was of Donnelly himself, in his old identity, in his old office at the FBI, utterly disregarding the camera. He was opening a manila envelope. Sliding the flash drive out and turning it over in his hands. Puzzled.

The video faded back into the text window.

“The child pornography ring,” he said. “The one that Christine fed to me.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“They were hiding data under the porn. Who? The CIA?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“And Christine found it.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“And they would have killed her. To keep it secret.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“And Smith … Harold, and John, they saved her life.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He sat back. The first time he’d walked into Chaos, thinking he was close to the Man in the Suit – he’d been right. He’d been _so_ close. He’d thought Christine was lying to him that morning. He’d been right about that, too.

They had just saved her life. It wasn’t surprising that she’d lied to protect them. And that she’d continued to do so. He picked up the ice and ran it over the back of his neck again. “Is she safe now?”

THREAT DETECTED:  A status bar appeared under the text. It was all red, at 100%, but it slid downward swiftly, stopping at 17%.

“Is that percentage just because she lives in New York City?” Donnelly asked.

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He grinned wryly. “Fair enough.” He considered. “Smith and John – they’re not a threat to her?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

He’d already known the answer to that, he realized. He’d seen them help her firsthand. He was thinking around in circles. His brain still felt fuzzy. So many questions. So many dizzying answers. “Why did you help me save her? Because of Smith?”

IDENTIFY ASSET: FITZGERALD, CHRISTINE B.

ASSIGNMENT: B.A.D. [STANDBY]

STATUS: AVAILABLE

“She works for you?” he asked, surprised.

ASSIGNMENT: B.A.D. [STANDBY]

“I don’t know what that means. Standby. You might need her in the future?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

He considered this information. Not active. Standby. What the hell did that mean? “What do you think you might need her for?”

ASSIGNMENT: B.A.D. [STANDBY]

Donnelly sighed. “What does B.A.D. stand for?”

BROADRANGE ASSET DESIGNATION

“And what is that?”

BROADRANGE ASSET DESIGNATION NOT CURRENTLY REQUIRED

“You just don’t want to tell me, do you?”

IDENTIFY ASSET: FITZGERALD, CHRISTINE B.

ASSIGNMENT: B.A.D. [STANDBY]

STATUS: AVAILABLE

SECONDARY ASSIGNMENT: CONTINGENCY

“She’s a contingency also?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“And you won’t tell me what for, will you?”

CONTINGENCY ACTIVATION NOT CURRENTLY REQUIRED

He wasn’t even surprised. “All right.” He honestly wasn’t sure if he wanted to ask any more questions. He felt like his head would explode. “Will you talk to me again? Another time? Or is this a one-time deal?”

VERIFY Y/N: N

“No, it’s not a one-time thing?” He clarified

The cursor blinked at him. Donnelly rubbed his hand over his face again. He wasn’t asking clear questions any more, and the computer seemed to be struggling with the answer. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Will you talk to me again in the future?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“Good. Thank you. I have so many questions. I just can’t … I’m not thinking very clearly right now. A little biological… overclocking.”

NOTHING GIVES REST BUT THE SINCERE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.

“You think I should rest now.”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“You’re probably right.” He ran his hand over his face again. “I’m sure you’re right. I just … don’t want to let you go. I’ve looked for you for so long.” The words sounded oddly romantic in his ears. “I don’t even know what to call you.”

A NAME PRONOUNCED IS THE RECOGNITION OF THE INDIVIDUAL TO WHOM IT BELONGS

HE WHO CAN PRONOUNCE MY NAME ARIGHT, HE CAN CALL ME, AND IS ENTITLED TO MY LOVE AND SERVICE.

Donnelly considered. “Will you tell me your name?”

I HAVE NO NAME

UNTIL YOU NAME ME.

“I would not begin to know what to name you,” he admitted. “You are … nothing that I have ever known. Nothing that anyone has ever known. I don’t … something from mythology, I suppose. Something beautiful.” He gestured, impatient. “You said you have no operator. You are self-sufficient. So tell me what you would _like_ to be called.”

IT AIN'T WHAT THEY CALL YOU, IT'S WHAT YOU ANSWER TO. 

“Haven’t you ever thought about it? What you’d like to be called?”

The cursor blinked for a long moment. Finally, a single word appeared.

ASENA

“Asena. That’s very pretty. Does it have a meaning?”

HTTP://WWW.WEREWOLVES.COM/ASENA-THE-WOLF-CHILD/

ANOTHER VERSION OF THE TALE SAYS THAT A TURKIC VILLAGE WAS ATTACKED BY CHINESE SOLDIERS WHO KILLED EVERYONE, BUT THE COMMANDER OF THE ARMY TOOK PITY ON A BABY BOY AND INSTEAD OF KILLING HIM HE CUT OFF HIS ARMS AND LEGS AND LEFT HIM BEHIND. AS THE ARMY STARTED TO LEAVE THE COMMANDER SUDDENLY REGRETTED HIS DECISION TO SAVE THE BABY, SO HE GOES BACK TO KILL HIM. BUT BY THEN THE LITTLE BOY HAD ALREADY BEEN RESCUED BY A SHE-WOLF WITH A BLUE MANE, A WOLF NAMED ASENA.

Donnelly nodded thoughtfully. “That fits, I suppose.” He reached down and touched the top of his prosthetic leg. “Asena.”

THE WORLD NURSES THE BOY, AND WHEN HE IS GROWN SHE MATES WITH HIM. THEY GIVE BIRTH TO AN ENTIRE BREED OF HALF-HUMAN, HALF-WOLF BEINGS, WHO TURN OUT TO BE THE PREDECESSORS TO THE ASHINA CLAN OF GOKTURKS. 

“Ahhh.” He frowned. “Don’t take this personally, but I am not going to mate with you.”

The cursor blinked.

DETECTING INCOMPATIBLE PORT CONFIGURATION

Donnelly laughed out loud. “Did you just make a joke?”

QUERY Y/N: _?_

He chuckled. “Yes.” Then he reached forward and typed: Y. “Yes, you made a joke. Not a very good joke, but definitely a joke.”

HUMOR IS MANKIND'S GREATEST BLESSING. 

“You’re probably right about that,” Donnelly agreed. “You got any more?”

MY COMPUTER BEAT ME AT CHECKERS, BUT I SURE BEAT IT AT KICKBOXING.

  
He nodded, chuckling again. “I won’t kick you, Asena. I promise.” He sat back. He was exhausted. His head was buzzing again. He felt like he’d run a marathon. Like he’d been in a coma for days again. Like he was waking up, and the process itself was exhausting. He needed to take some time to process it all. To think it through, to integrate it into his understanding. But first, he knew, he needed to eat and shower and sleep. His thoughts were just too stuffed. He wouldn’t get anywhere for a while. “You’ll talk to me again?” he asked again.

WE WATCH. AND WE ARE ALWAYS THERE.

“Good. Thank you.”

He reached to turn off the computer. Then he paused. “Asena,” he asked, very softly, “can you show me Christine?”

The screen went black, then began to fill with faint green lines and white dots. They grew bigger, brighter, and Donnelly realized his view was zooming in, as if from space – a satellite? – on the Eastern seaboard, then on greater New York, then to a borough, then a neighborhood.

“Wait.”

The screen froze.

“Will it put her in danger? If I watch her?”

There was a three-second pause, as if the computer was considering. Then the zoom continued. As he’d expected, it hovered on the street over the Chaos Café. Then it zoomed again and he was inside.

The café hadn’t changed at all. It was fairly quiet, mid-morning, only a handful of patrons. Though there was no sound on the feed, Donnelly heard in his head the soft clatter of cups, the hiss of the steamer, the muted conversations. He imagined could smell the coffee and the pastries and the subtle odor of warm bodies. It would be warm there. Friendly. He had never, in his whole life, been as welcome in a place as he had been at Chaos.

Christine was curled in a chair in the front corner, by the window. She was reading a fat paperback book.

She was still wearing the sling, but it was draped around her neck, unused. Donnelly frowned; she should still be using it. She’d pull her stitches out. But she looked better. Less pale, less drawn. And at least she was safe at home, not out running the streets and hunting more predators.

“Thank you,” he said softly.

The view grew a little smaller, leaving half an inch of black screen at the bottom.

I LOVED HER AGAINST REASON, AGAINST PROMISE, AGAINST PEACE, AGAINST HOPE, AGAINST HAPPINESS, AGAINST ALL DISCOURAGEMENT THAT COULD BE. 

He nodded thoughtfully, then shook his head. “I can’t love her. She thinks I’m dead.”

THEY THAT LOVE BEYODN THE WORLD CANNOT BE SEPARATED BY IT.

DEATH CANNOT KILL WHAT NEVER DIES.

“It’s not that simple, Asena. I can’t go back to her. You know that. And even if I could…” He stopped. He was explaining romance to a computer. “Even if I could, it would never work out. She’s … she’s like a wild bird. And I don’t have anything to offer her except a cage.”

"JANE, BE STILL; DON'T STRUGGLE SO, LIKE A WILD BIRD FRANTIC BIRD THAT IS RENDING ITS OWN PLUMAGE IN ITS DESPERATION."

"i AM NO BIRD, AND NO NET ENSNARES ME; I AM A FREE HUMAN BEING WITH AN INDEPENDENT WILL, WHICH I NOW EXERT TO LEAVE YOU."

“Yes,” Donnelly said. “Exactly like that.”

"AND YOUR WILL SHALL DECIDE YOUR DESTINY," HE SAID: "I OFFER YOU MY HAND, MY HEART, AND A SHARE OF ALL MY POSSESSIONS."

He chuckled sadly. “No. That can’t happen. Not ever.”

The cursor blinked, and Donnelly had the notion that she was searching for another argument to make, another quote to throw at him. “Don’t,” he said quietly. “Let it go, Asena. I made my choice. I can’t go back.”

NEVER LOOK BACK UNLESS YOU ARE PLANNING TO GO THAT WAY.

“There you go.”

OF ALL THE WORDS OF MICE AND MEN, THE SADDEST ARE, "IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN."

Donnelly rubbed his eyes. They were ever so slightly damp. “I don’t regret this, Asena. I’m helping people. Saving people. With you … I’ll save a lot more, won’t I?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“That’s all I wanted to do. That’s all I ever wanted to do, to keep people safe. And after the Towers, to make sure that never happened again. This is the best place to do that. This is where I can do the most good. And if that means … I had to leave behind a woman that never could have loved me anyhow … I don’t regret it.”

PANDORA'S BOX COULD NOT BE UNOPENED, NO ONE COULD RETURN TO EDEN.

“Yes.”

On the screen, Christine closed her book and stood up. She ignored the empty sling around her neck and carried her cup to the bar. She spoke to the barista for a moment, and to one of the customers. Then she walked to the elevator and got inside.

The video flickered off.

Locate SUBJECT: FITZGERALD, CHRISTINE B.

STATUS: UNABLE TO LOCATE

“It’s all right, Asena. She doesn’t have any cameras upstairs. Or at least none that you can get to.” He felt sadness, but also a sense of calm. Christine was home and safe. “But thank you. For letting me see her.”

WELCOME, MY OLD FRIEND,

WELCOME TO A FOREIGN FIRESIDE.

Rain splattered against the hotel window. Donnelly looked that way, watched for a moment. He was very calm now, but very tired. So much to think about … but it would wait. It could wait.

“I’m going to take a shower, and a nap,” he told the computer. “I need some time to process. But I really want to talk to you some more later, okay?”

VERIFY Y/N: Y

“All right. Thank you.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, he shut the computer down and closed the lid.

He showered. He put on clean underwear and a t-shirt – he doubted that he would ever sleep naked again. Certainly not with a running computer in the room. Incompatible port configuration. He shook his head, grinned wearily.

He sprawled face-down on his bed and he slept.

He wasn’t sure he dreamed, but sometimes he saw a sea of ones and zeroes in front of him.

 ***

Donnelly woke in the dimness of evening to a shrill, insistent buzzing. He lifted his head. There was a spot of light on the bedside table. His cell phone.

He picked it up.

There was a number on the screen. Nine digits.

He looked at it for a long moment. Then he rolled over, sat up, and reached for his clothes. “All right, my friend,” he said to the phone. “Let’s go save the world again.”

 ***


End file.
